


in the stillness of remembering what you had and what you lost

by starraya



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-02-22
Updated: 2016-04-10
Packaged: 2018-05-22 16:07:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 21,917
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6086137
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starraya/pseuds/starraya
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>‘It had been six days since the accident, six long days of River sitting by her husband’s bedside, alternatively sobbing, begging for him to be alright and whispering hoarse threats that if he had the audacity to die she’d promptly kill him. He was not leaving her in this world alone. Oh no. And he hadn't. John Smith hadn’t died. But he hadn’t survived fully either. She’d learnt that devastating truth yesterday as well. Instead a man who called himself The Doctor had.’</p><p> Modern day, human AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Oddity

**Author's Note:**

> So I've written all 7 chapters of this work and *fingers crossed* will be posting them regularly. 
> 
> I hope the story will make it clear but just as a heads up. River Song and John Smith are real. The Doctor and Melody Pond are merely products of John's imagination. Also River is not Amy and Rory's daughter in this universe. 
> 
> The story touches on some difficult themes, and whilst I haven't put them in the title, I will include relevant warnings at the top of each chapter. The story as a whole deals directly and indirectly with old-age related issues and mental health issues.

Early days were never easy.

  
That was one of life’s simple rules. River recalled her first night in the care home when she was a little girl, her kicking and screaming, her clever plans to run away and her frequent failed attempts. She’d had one wish: to run and never stop. But she had settled down. Had chosen fight instead of flight and become a troublesome child who never took to figures of authority. Those days had not been easy either.

  
Life wasn’t easy, but you got used to its trials once the early days passed in their full kicking-and-screaming glory. That was what River told herself as she made her way, back straight, head forward, along the hospital corridors and towards the room where her husband lay.

  
Yesterday he had woken up. It had been six days, six long days of River sitting beside her husband’s bedside, alternatively sobbing, begging for him to be aright and whispering hoarse threats that if he had the audacity to die she’d promptly kill him. He was not leaving her in this world alone. Oh no.

  
And he hadn’t.

 

John Smith hadn’t died, but he hadn’t fully survived either. She’d learnt that devastating truth yesterday as well. Instead a man who called himself The Doctor had.

  
-

  
_The day before_

  
When River notices John stirring and hears incoherent mumbling, her heart leaps and she calls for a Doctor. She clutches John’s hand, a strange mix of relief and anticipation pulsing though her, almost nauseating in its strength. Her other hand impatiently taps on the hard plastic of the chair she is perched on. Trembling just the slightest bit, she reluctantly tears herself away from John’s bedside, moving back so the doctor can properly inspect her husband.

  
Her husband is awake. Softly, so only she can hear it, River murmurs “hello Sweetie” and a tiny smile dares to upturn the corners of her mouth. When the doctor steps back, River cautiously inches closer to John.

  
His eyes dart around the room and lock on hers. They burn with hatred.

  
“Get out,” he shouts, his lip curling up in revulsion, “Get out! Get her out!”

  
As effortlessly as water spilling through her fingers, River’s hope falls away into nothingness. In its place fear clenches her heart. The doctors had warned her, right from that dreadful first night River had spent sat outside a hospital room, unable to eat, move, sleep, properly think, even cry. The only thing she had felt was the curious sensation of the ground being gradually but surely torn from under her feet.

 

 _Prepare for the first,_ the doctors' solemn faces had told her and she had. Endless days had rolled into endless nights and she had done nothing but torment her mind with all number of grim possibilities. But under all those thoughts, like a stone sunken to the bottom of a pond, was hope, sometimes selfish, sometimes not, but always there even if it was not displayed on the surface of her features. John would pull through. For her sake he had to be alright.

  
And if not . . . well, ever since their wedding day the two of them, when they had vowed to love one another “always and completely”, had made a promise. They were in this life together, regardless of the distance between them or however insurmountable their problems looked. That was a promise River would never break. They had not promised to love each other eternally -- forever didn’t exist except only in fairy tales -- but to love each other passionately, wholly, warts and all.

  
“Always and completely,” River had muttered over and over at John's bedside, her voice faint, hoarse from crying as much as she had. Her words had meant to remind him that both of them had a promise to keep, not just her. She needed for him to wake up, and when he did, she would be there for him, whatever happened next.

  
She had imagined anything but this.

  
River’s heart shatters in time with her husband’s increasingly distressed shouts. The nurses are trying to calm him. The doctor is telling her something, but River doesn't hear her. For a moment sound blurs, softens as it does when you're submerged in a pool and spirals through the room like paint slowly distilling in water.

  
Then someone pulls the plug on the illusion. Her husband.

  
“All of you,” he orders, “turn around and get out. Flyaway.”

 

Limbs thrashing wildly, John tries to sit up and get out of bed. When the nurses gently but firmly restrain him, lest John do himself any further injury, the most horrible thing, River later reflects on, is how weakly her husband repeats “flyway” as he acquiesces to the nurse’s wishes, allowing his body to sink feebly back down onto the bed.

  
“Flyaway,” he pleads, voice barely more than a whisper. His eyes find River’s again. They are huge and terrified. They are the eyes of a child in a strange place, a child who wants nothing more than for everyone to just leave him alone so he can lock himself in his bedroom, scramble in his bed and hide under the covers from the monsters. From the way John looks at her River knows that she is one of the monsters.

  
That realisation, instead of rooting her to the spot, leads her to drift towards him further on legs that don’t feel like her own. Ignoring whatever the nurses and doctors are saying she moves to hover right beside him. She takes a deep, steadying breath.

  
“Please tell me you know who I am.”

  
“Who are you?” He voice is thick with the fear of this unknown place and these strange people.

 

Recoiling back a step, River bites her lip to stop it from quivering before saying his name.

 

Wrong move.

 

His body bolts up from the bed.

 

“My name is The Doctor. The Doctor! I’m The Doctor.”

  
Seconds after, his body loses its strength and sinks back down again. River watches her husband turn his back to her, pull the blankets tight over himself and huddle within their protective warmth and whilst she can’t see his sobs, she can hear them fill the room.

  
-

  
_One month later_

  
The woman always seems to be waiting. Her face is lined with age and bears a vacant expression of patience for something that will never happen, or perhaps, someone who will never arrive. Her gaze remains unfocused on anything in particular. Her eyes are uninterested in the limitations of what can be observed. Instead, the young girl inside her mind trips down rabbit holes and flees into fairy-tales.

  
The clock ticks, but she doesn’t hear it.

  
Time does not keep her prisoner. Time is undecided in fairy-tale. A day can last a month, then a month just a day. The day The Doctor calls, Time stretches out and slows down. The Doctor stumbles in her life with a goofy smile, a tweak of his red bowtie and a bounce in his childish gait. He runs over to her and holds out his hand. The old woman shakes it out of a remembered reflex rather than a conscious awareness to reciprocate his greeting.

  
His ramblings on dwarf stars and quantum mechanics and how Time does not run in a straight, orderly line, but is really a wibbly-wobbly mess, fall on a surface that they do not sink into. Whilst The Doctor is lost in his own world, the elderly woman is lost in hers. But even if she doesn’t understand most of what he is saying, company is company. When they are finishing their lunch together, he points and whispers for her to leave the fish fingers. With a conspiratorial wink, The Doctor demonstrates to his new companion how to wrap up the battered fish carefully into a napkin, before hiding it until tea is whisked away and replaced by one half of his favourite pudding.

  
Impassionedly, he informs her that he has long discovered that apples are hideously disgusting things and never, never asks for the apple pie his companion is currently tucking into. As he unwraps the fish fingers and dunks them in his bowl of custard, she wrinkles her nose in disgust. The oddness of the whole moment draws her out of her thoughts. All her attention is now on the weird but wonderful stranger next to her. Hesitantly, the elderly woman dips one of the fish fingers she has hidden away in the bowl of custard in front of her.

  
The Doctor nods his head in encouragement.

  
“Don’t worry,” he reassures her, in the only way a man offering such a delicacy was bound to, “it won’t make you ten-foot tall or shrink you to the size of a pin.”

  
The old woman takes a bite and no more. She is surprised to find out that fish fingers and custard is not as revolting as its sounds. The Doctor returns her smile. They both share a realisation. This is the first time that they have properly met and while before identity hadn’t seemed to be of much relevance, interest in the other prevails.

  
“I’m The Doctor by the way,” he announces, tapping his bowtie as if this action alone explains  simultaneously the subject in which he has earned his doctorate and why he does not offer a surname. His new acquaintance does not question it. A distant look forms in her eyes. When she replies “Amelia Pond” her voice is faint and distracted.

  
A woman in blue uniform approaches Amy and The Doctor. “Amy, your husband is here.”

  
Turning with a warm smile to the middle-aged man who is scraping the last of the custard from his bowl with half a fish finger, the woman informs him that his wife will be here soon too.

  
“Well,” John Smith adjusts his bowtie, wipes his mouth on a napkin and brings Amelia William’s papery, frail hand to his lips briefly. “Fantastic meeting you Pond.”

  
He jumps up out his chair to follow the woman in blue back to his room in order to wait for his wife’s regular evening visit. He knows that Amy will, in all likelihood, forget meeting him  and that he will have to introduce himself again to her.

  
Such a thing happened just last week.

  
-

 

Compared to how it had been before John’s accident, River Song is well aware that her life will probably appear monotonous to an outsider. She has lectured on archaeology at the university she is now contracted to work part-time at, gone back to an empty house and eaten something quick, processed and tasteless before getting in her car once more and beginning the journey that is now engraved in her brain.

  
She couldn’t be bothered to change out of her work clothes, but her appearance is anything but smart. Her pencil skirt is ceased, unruly strands of her hair have long escaped the chignon she twisted them into earlier this morning and her lipstick has faded. After she pulls up her car in the visitor’s car park, she checks her reflection in the mirror. Her eyes are lined with a tiredness that she can never seem to shake off, no matter how many nights she takes a sleeping pill. Sighing, River exits her car before heading for the entrance of the facility. She knows she looks her fifty years, but she also knows that her husband never seems to care how she looks anymore. She signs herself in, shares a small smile with a passing employee that she recognises and makes her way to her husband’s room.

  
On an impulse, she stops at the end of an empty corridor and fumbles for the small mirror and tube of lipstick in her handbag. She reapplies the make-up, remembering how it used to be her husband’s favourite shade and how he used to tease her that it possessed abnormal, hypnotic qualities when they both were younger and carefree and made silly stuff up like that. After smoothing her skirt and tucking strands of her hair behind her ear, she decides she doesn’t care if her husband doesn’t care what she looks like anymore.

  
As it frequently is, the door to John’s room is open. Approaching it as she walks down the corridor, River catches sight of his tweed covered back. She can’t discern exactly what he is doing hunched at his desk, but she has a good guess. The last time she visited he was taking apart an old clock watch. Cogs and coils had been fastidiously grouped together in small piles all over his desk in a pattern River hadn’t understood. There are always oddities on her husband’s desk: a typewriter that he never uses, one useless half of a skipping rope and a broken, blue rotary telephone. The staff at the facility have given up on trying to find out where John gets everything from.

  
Spotting the woman in John’s room, River hovers at his doorway for a few seconds and watches her husband proudly detail the contents of his desk to his friend. His hands whizz around in the air excitedly. River knows that he is in his element. She sees how his eyes twinkle full of youth as he shows off his collection of oddities.

  
River is just about to announce her presence when the other woman, her long grey hair flying, abruptly spins around to look River over with fascination.

 

“Is she your wife?”

  
But for all the tone of intrigue in her question, Amy does not wait for an answer and instead her attention redirects on the typewriter as she sweeps her hand over it. Turning his head to follow Amy’s gaze, John breaks off his speech and springs out his chair. He runs over to his wife, grabs her hand and pulls her into his room with the mirth of a thrilled child whose late best friend has finally turned up at their birthday party.

 

“Melody!”

 

“Hello Sweetie.”

 

River's smile falls when she sees her husband’s eyes darken. Fear overcomes his features. Quickly, he guides her to the window of his room. It overlooks the gardens towards the back of the building. The view is meant to be picturesque and calming, but Melody has always thought that the dozens of human-sized stone statues that hunch solemnly at different corners of the lawn are despairingly grave-like. Eyes fixated on the stone statues, John’s voice drops deadly low.

  
“The weeping angels,” he confides to River, “they’ve found me again.”

  
Automatically, River squeezes his hand to sooth him. As she mentally prepares all number of comforting responses, deep within her a part of her still intact breaks, the part that had foolishly hoped that the early days were over.

  
It seems they never will be.


	2. Dust

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 'Far below she heard the sea slap at the stones, the sound as heavy and rhythmic as a heart-beat. The air was twanged with the smell of salt and heavy with that particular bracing freshness only found at the edge of land.
> 
> Underneath the blanket River slid her hand into John’s. His eyes remained locked on the constellations burning bright above them, but his thumb brushed tenderly over the smooth skin of the back of her hand.
> 
> I want to show you the stars, John had told her. I know a place where they shine so bright it’s almost like daylight. But better.'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The same warnings as last chapter apply.

Rory Williams places his hat – the one he never goes outside without – on top of a head dusted with fine, silvery wisps of hair. Steadily, with one hand gripping a walking stick, he makes his way across the car park. He breathes in the fresh spring air, heady with the smell of cut grass and petrichor, before humming a song to himself. While he can remember the tune of the song the words are long forgotten in his memory.

 

Rory looks for the daffodils that are planted either side of the building’s entrance. They bud there every year and every year they make him smile with their brightness. This year they have sprouted later than usual.

 

Once inside the building, in tidy, cursive letters Rory inscribes his name in the visitor’s book next to ‘Amelia Williams’. The action itself is a daily, private acknowledgment that, despite the passing years, she is still his wife, still his Amelia, still a Williams’. After removing his hat and patting down his hair, Rory struggles up two flights of stairs and by the time he arrives at Amy’s room he is wheezing for breath. Amy doesn’t look up at his entrance, but Rory is delighted at the sight that greets him. Resting on a wooden stool, a paint-splodged palette in her hand, Amy is transfixed on the canvas set up in front of her.

 

“You’re painting,” Rory says, his face lighting up. When they were younger Amy had painted all the time. If one was to fall in love with feisty, strong and beautiful Amelia Pond one couldn’t help falling in love with her imagination too, one so vividly captured in her artwork. Amy had flitted between careers throughout her life, from modelling in her late teens to freelance writing in her twenties, but at home there would no doubt be an easel set up somewhere. He knows Amy paints when she is happy. When she had stopped suddenly a decade ago, Rory had felt a heavy weight descend upon his heart as if the organ was an anchor and someone had heaved it overboard to let it to sink alone to the darkness of the ocean floor.

 

“Good afternoon, my love,” he says in a cheery tone.

 

Easing himself into the armchair opposite the window, he remarks on the lovely, mild April weather. Amy is too lost in her work to respond. Her thin lips are pursed together in concentration. Her hair is pulled back at the nape of her neck into one simple, long plait. She has rolled the sleeves of her oversized peach jumper up her arms and Rory can see that the skin of her lower arms, pale and freckled, is smudged with blue paint. Rory thinks she makes a lovelier sight than the daffodils. To him she is the most beautiful woman on earth. Within her face still lingers traces of the old school friend Rory had grown up playing dares with, dares he had always somehow caught the raw end of until she had dared him to go to the pictures with her on a date.

 

“Ten,” the sharp syllable pierces the air and pulls Rory out of his thoughts.

 

“I’m sorry. What was that dear?”

 

“There’s a crack in my bedroom wall. He came through a crack in the wall.” Amy says, but carries on painting.

 

“Who did? What are you on about?”

 

“Nine.”

 

“Amy?” Growing concerned, Rory questions her again. “What are you painting? Numbers? A clock?”

 

She scrubs furiously at her eye with her hand.

 

“Amy, what’s wrong? Have you got something in your eye? Dust?”

 

When she continues to count down to eight, Rory gets up from the armchair.

 

“Seven.”

 

Pushing his glasses further up on the ridge of nose, he goes to take a look at Amy’s painting in progress. At the centre of the canvas is a jagged crack of light, but around it are the gnarled and curved silhouettes of tree branches. Sat at the base of one tree is a girl with red hair and beside her stands a grey thin man. It is only upon close inspection that Rory discerns from the shadowy spaces into between the trees that Amy has painted more than two faces. She has painted dozens. Heads crooked, teeth snarling and arms wide dozens of stone angels lurk within the forest. Rory recognises them as the statues at the back of the building. He has seen them once. There life-like scale had made him uneasy, as did the sense that -- even though they had there eyes covered innocently enough with the palms of their hands as if they were frightened -- they were watching you. Amy's room does not overlook the gardens with the angels in, but rather the front car park. Rory didn't know that she had ever seen them until now.

 

“Six.”

 

"Amy what's wrong?"

 

Receiving no answer, Rory eyes go to find the door. He thinks he should call someone. He spots two canvases lined up against the corner wall that he had never seen before. Looking through them he finds the same crack and the same grey mystery figure on both of the paintings. Apart from that they are quite different. On the one Amy has painted the faces of clowns, alternatively grinning and frowning, their painted lips peeling. On another she has painted stacks of sandbags, windows with black criss-crossed tape on them and long, thin streams of light beaming up into the night sky. Anyone of Rory's generation would recognise London in the blitz, but the metal, pepper-pot shaped machines Amy has also painted are certainly not like any kind of weapon used back then. With their blue eyestalks they appear slightly human, Rory thinks.

 

“Mr Williams, could we please have a talk outside for a moment,” a man in blue uniform knocks on Amy’s door, even though it is open. (All the doors are always open here.) Rory leans Amy’s paintings back up against the wall before giving the man a small nod and following him outside. A familiar sense of dread grows in the pit of Rory’s stomach.

 

“Rory?”

 

He turns back to see Amy staring at him.

 

“Goodbye,” she tells him.

 

“I’ll only be gone a few minutes dear,” he assures her. When he exits the room he hears her call “Goodbye, Rory” again.

 

-

 

The afternoon sun shines in a cloudless sky, but the wind has gathered strength and now blasts icily at Rory's face despite it. Sitting on a bench overlooking the sprawling, colourful gardens at the side of the building, Rory shields his eyes for a moment against the burning white sunlight.

 

Nowadays he takes the time, after his daily visit to Amy, to sit outside. He has only the bees that buzz infrequently over the flowers for company typically, but today someone else joins him. He tries to make out her silhouette in the distance, but he has to squint against the sun. It is only when she sits next to him that she recognises who she is. She is a woman he sees quite around here. She is a visitor like him. River offers him one of the steaming cups of tea in her hands. They are only from a machine at the back of the care home, but the wrinkles of Rory’s face crease up in thanks at the kind gesture as he smiles.

 

“Have you any sugar, dear?”

 

“Sugar. No sorry. For some reason there wasn’t any.”

 

“Never mind,” he replies, “I really should cut down on the sweet stuff anyway. My wife always used to say that if I carried on the way I did . . . oh, it doesn’t matter.” The kind woman sat next to him, Rory tells himself, doesn’t want to hear about his sad musings for days gone by. He takes a sip of his tea and silence descends. At a loss of what to say next both stare at the flowers nodding in the breeze. All they can think of to say, words that might strike up conversation again sound too prying in their heads. River has a faint idea of her companion’s circumstances. He is the elderly man who catches two buses every day to see a wife that has been ill a long time.

 

Gladly taking another sip of her hot tea, River pulls the collar of her coat up around the front of her neck against the wind. In the past she has often caught herself pouring two cups of teas, one for her, one for John, forgetting that he doesn’t drink tea anymore. Her husband doesn’t drink or eat a lot of what he did before the accident. Today she remembered that. It appears as if her brain is finally subsuming the reality of her life now into normality. However, when she poured the cup of tea for the elderly man she saw outside alone her motive had not been entirely selfless. It was a Saturday which meant that visiting time was over and that her husband was currently tucking into his lunch and, whilst she had wanted to go home, emotionally exhausted from John's persistent pleas to help him defeat the angels, she also hadn’t wanted to be alone either.

 

-

 

That night, a few moments before the facility calls her, explaining that for a couple of minutes they had suffered a power cut and ever since John hadn't stopped talking about the angels in the garden coming to get him and asking for Melody in quite a distressed manner and while they had tried to calm him down his behaviour had become threatening and Miss Song had wished to be alerted of such circumstances, River finds herself reading the first few pages of her diary. One entry recalls a date that she once affectionately remembered like yesterday, but reading her words back now they do not feel like her own. They have amassed a strange, unreal quality. They are like the scene of a movie. You observe it at a close distance but you are not part of it.

 

Her words are like a well-known story, but one with alterations, a common childhood fairy tale strangely told in a foreign language.

 

-

_32 years ago_

 

River let out a frustrated sigh and pressed the telephone closer to her ear, trying not to think of how many people had used the payphone box she was. She'd been out shopping in town, for an outfit, but, unable to decide what to buy, she had nothing to show for it.

 

“Well if you’re not going to give me any clue as to what I should wear on this mystery date,” she reasoned, “at least tell me what you’ll be wearing.”

 

“A bowtie,” was all that was offered by the person on the other side of the call.

 

River rolled her eyes.John practically wore a bowtie everywhere he went. Impatiently twirling the phone cord around her fingers, Melody refrained from answering for a minute as she waited for some of her exasperation subside, lest she say a few choice words. She had gone through this line of inquiry a hundred times and every time John had been just as unhelpful.

 

“Look, Sweetie, unless you want me to show up nude tonight, you’re going to need to be a bit more specific.” There was a pause. River almost swore that she could hear John blushing on the other end.

 

“A special kind of bowtie.”

 

River groaned. “What special kind of bowtie? Are you wearing a suit? Are we going to a restaurant uptown?”

 

“I told you Song. I’m not telling. Besides, it’s somewhere you won’t guess. Stop trying.”

 

“I hate surprises,” she huffed.

 

“I know.” River almost heard him smirking smugly against the receiver. Glancing at her watch, she shifted her weight from one foot to the other. If she was not careful, she would miss the bus home and end up turning late to the date, wherever it was, tonight.

 

“As long you don’t end up taking me to somewhere bizarre like a grubby little fish and chip shop, I might just resist the urge not to kill you tonight,” she warned him.

  
“You’re already tricked that trick,” he reminded her, thinking back to how they had become properly acquainted.

  
“I hate-”

  
“No you don’t,” he quipped, cutting her off before she can finish.

  
“I’ll see you tonight,” she said and hung up. Despite not discovering the answer to the question she had wanted, the one she been pestering John with ever since he announced he was taking her on a ‘adventure’, a smile swept across River’s face. Nervousness and excitement for tonight crept up her spine. She may not have known where the hell he was whisking her away to, but River was certain of one thing: she could never hate that man.

  
It turned out that she mercifully did not kill him or attempt to when she found herself stood opposite a fish and chip shop later that evening in a long, shimmering green evening dress. If there was anything to help her feel less out of place, it was the fact that John had in fact chosen, for some reason, to wear a suit and top hat. They both looked as if they were about to step inside an opulent, velvet-lined opera house instead of a pokey fish and chip shop.

  
“Is this some sort of a joke?”

  
He had chuckled at that, but his laughter quickly died when he saw the incredulous look on her face. There was a certain, quizzical look in her eyes that asked if this was a joke on her. River's embarrassment clouded over with a growing anger. This was a joke to him, she thought and went to turn away, leave him, walk away, even if she didn’t know where on earth she was. Before she could, his hand lightly touched her arm and she saw his face crumple up in concern.

 

“No, no,” he rattled off a breathless apology, “of course not. I’d never . . . This isn’t the surprise.”

  
“Then what is? Are we eating here or not?” Her questions were rapid, but her tone had softened somewhat.

  
“No and yes. You see, River, where we’re going later they aren’t many restaurants. There isn’t really anything come to think of it.” Except starlight, John thought to himself.

 

“I was going to make a picnic, I did make a picnic, but it’s just . . .”

  
“Just what?”

  
“The dog ate it.” His cheeks coloured adorably. River laughed.

  
“Seriously?”

  
“Even the Jammie Dodgers. It’s not funny, I spent hours . . .”

  
“Hush,” she said, motioning towards the door of the shop with a tilt of her head, “I’m starving.”

  
-

  
River discovered that the meal of fish and chips was one of convenience, the shop being the closest source of food to where John took her next, highly unconventional place for a date that matched their cuisine. They ended up eating their fish and chips, whilst huddling together in the tartan blankets John had thoughtfully remembered, on a bench on a cliff side. The blankets helped fend off the evening sea breeze. But not quite. A wonderful excuse, River thought, to edge closer to her date for his body warmth. She didn't want to get frostbite after all. Or freeze to ice on him, that would be bad form on a date.

 

She was thankful she had tied her back. Otherwise the wind would have whipped her loose curls in every direction, over her face, over her eyes. She wouldn’t have been able to stare up at the perfectly cloudless night sky, incandescent with millions upon millions of blinking stars. Far below she heard the sea slap at the stones, the sound as heavy and rhythmic as a heart-beat. The air was twanged with the smell of salt and heavy with that particular bracing freshness only found at the edge of land. Underneath the blanket River slid her hand into John’s. His eyes remained locked on the constellations burning bright above them, but his thumb brushed tenderly over the smooth skin of the back of her hand.

  
"I want to show you the stars," John had told her when they were lining up for the fish and chips. "I know a place where they shine so bright it’s almost like daylight. But better."

  
He was like no man River had ever known. He had dragged her up a cliff side, she in a dress and heels, so they could catch “the finest view of the universe that night”. He was man who, when she asked, said he knew not the name of one constellation to trace invisibly with his fingertips and explain to her in an effort to impress as she thought he might. Instead, he had gesticulated to her the life-cycle of stars with so much passion and admiration and awe that his eyes had almost shone as bright as what he was talking about.

  
"Strange," River had mused when he had finished, "to think how all we are, in the end, is stardust. Atoms. Disbanding and reconfiguring across the universe."

  
"Like stories," he added, "never-ending stories. From the very beginning of time to the end."

  
"Not quite never-ending," she murmured, "it’s like you said, some of those stars, they’re dead. No longer there. They don’t exist no more. Even if we can still see their light. They’re dead."

  
"That’s the most magnificent bit," he said, "that they are dead, but we can see there light. They’re not dead here. They’re still brilliantly alive. All stories have an end. But there are hidden chapters for those who look for them."

  
"If anyone came along now," River smiled, "they’d think we were mad."

  
"Aren’t we?"

  
"You tell me."

  
He was like no man she had ever known, River had thought again, with his talk of stories and stars and hidden possibilities in plain sight. A single tear slipped silently down her check. Oh that man, she had thought, who’d said he’d found the most breath-taking view in this kingdom and had simply had to show her. He’d saw a million stars and thought of her. River wiped the tear away, before squeezing John’s hand softly.

  
"Steal me a star," she had asked.

  
He'd chuckled. "Aren’t you ever the thieving teenage delinquent? I expect stealing a star would be almost impossible."

 

"Loving the almost."

 

"I thought you might. But I can't."

 

"Really, Sweetie. You can talk. You can pick a lock almost as fast as I can. Steal. Me. A. Star." Looking down from the stars, John turned to face her.

 

"I would but it doesn’t quite work like that," he said," You have to search for those hidden pockets of light in life, sometimes it takes a lifetime, sometimes they just float into your lap. _"_

 

Shifting his body so it was fully turned to River, John took Melody’s other hand in his empty one. For a moment he held both of her hands, before gently loosening them.

"I'm not a waiting kind of person."

 

"I know, he said, and that's okay. Because sometimes . . . sometimes we can write our own stories, our hidden chapters."

 

"You're making this up as you go along."

 

"Not all of it. _"_

 

"Prove it. _"_ At her command he moved so close to her that she could feel his warmth breath on her face.

 

River's eyes flickered to look down at his lips, then back up to his eyes. Her voice was a whisper. "Can I?"

 

As their lips read each other's for the first time, River found that the taste of John's lips was peculiar. They had tasted familiar and unfamiliar, old and new, of Time itself. Of endless possibilities. Found chapters.

 

Dying stars.

 


	3. Distance

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> 'She has to stop running from reality, she thinks. Her eyes focus directly on the blue box half-obscured by the long grass of the garden. It immediately reminds her of John, not that her thoughts have strayed from thinking of him much since she has arrived back home. He is always hovering in her mind, like a tormented ghost unable to receive closure, a ghost forced to wail eternally to the ears of mortals. The sight of the blue box sends a shiver down River's spine. Her husband is not a ghost, River tells herself. He is not dead, even if the blue box, with its rotting wood, its peeling paint, stands forlorn as if he is. Her husband is not dead, but he's like an idea not fully realised, a drawing not fully coloured in. He's a faded sketch in pencil, a painting left blank in odd parts.'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Same warnings as the previous chapters apply.

Three months later when Rory visits Amy, with the sunflower he always brings her on a Sunday clasped within his hand – her favourite  – Rory finds her painting the grey murky canals, crumbling, stained brick walls and white arched bridges of Venice. She is working on a tiny silhouette of a gondola when he arrives and arranges the single flower in a vase on her bedside table. A man in blue uniform is finishing his daily check on Amy. Catching Rory noticing the painting, the man remarks “Amy’s a beautiful painter. It almost looks like a photo."

 

Rory proudly smiles.

 

“Have you been? To Venice?” The man asks.

 

“No,” Rory says in a tone of regret.

 

“Don’t be silly. Of course we have. We went the night before our wedding,” Amy corrects him before adding the microscopic ribbon of a gondolier’s straw boater hat to her painting with a flick of her paintbrush. A little while later she paints in three figures, her, Rory and the same grey man Rory had spotted in her other paintings. When Rory asks her who the grey man is, she replies with “The Doctor stupid-face” before kissing his cheek. The gesture of affection leaves Rory cold. For nigh on a decade she has not kissed him. What has changed?

 

-

 

“I thought she was painting things that had happened in her life. You see she was born the year the war ended, but the cities were still in ruins. I thought perhaps . . . the clowns . . . she used to go to the circus as a child. But Venice. This one’s different,” Rory took a contemplative sip of his coffee, “Amy had always wanted to holiday in Venice. In our twenties we even started saving up. We were going to honeymoon there.”

 

“What happened? River asks. She and Rory are sat on the same bench they met on. It has gradually become a habit of theirs, to align their visiting times when possible and afterwards chat for a bit. At first their chats had been quite formal and brief. Lately, however, they find themselves talking to the other about their pasts, sometimes without knowing it – maybe in an effort to remind themselves that their lives are not defined by what is happening now, or their marriages. Slowly they have learnt bits and pieces about the other and have developed a degree of rapport. It is due to this that Rory carries on, telling River more about his relationship to Amy than he has ever before to the blonde-haired woman.

 

“I don’t really know, not exactly. We never stopped not wanting to go. We just didn’t for some reason. The first time we were to get wed Amy got cold feet so to say, ran-away. She was always scared of commitment. She said she still loved me, but she just wasn’t ready to marry. By the time this happened we were all but halfway to the altar. We still had the reception, Amy never could resist a party. We’d booked the tickets to the honeymoon to Venice, but we never went to Italy. We wanted it as our real honeymoon a few years later so we went caravanning for a week in Wales instead. We had another wedding to save up for and– Sorry, you don't want to hear all of this."

 

“No, no. I do,” River assures him, “please, go on. You forget I’m an archaeologist. I can’t resist a good story. And . . . to be quite frank, Rory, well, I don’t get much company these days – the cat tries her best but –” Slightly embarrassed at this admission of loneliness, River looks down at her empty coffee cup.

 

“I know how you feel,” Rory says before picking up the thread of his story again and re-weaving the memory in his mind. “We married properly a few years later, but money was tight. We just couldn’t afford to go to Venice. The sad thing is, the same happened again when we both older. I missed the chance to take her to New York. I fell ill for a bit. And well, I recovered, but travelling was out of the question."

 

"Why New York?"

 

"Oh, it's silly really. I had wanted to surprise Amy for our fortieth wedding anniversary and take her to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see a particular painting of sunflowers by Van Gogh. He's her favourite painter."

 

“Is that what she is? What she works as, a painter?"

 

“Oh, no. It was just a hobby. I kept telling her that she was better than she thought and should think about trying to sell a few of her pieces. She said she couldn’t. They were parts of her childhood, part of her and she couldn't give them away to a stranger. That was what I thought she was doing now, painting her life again. But now I think it's not just that. Today when I saw her painting Venice, I realised that she might be painting things she wishes that she'd done." _All the things she thinks she’s done_ , Rory adds silently in his head. “No, she wasn’t a painter," Rory continues, "Amy was a storyteller at heart, a writer.”

 

“What kind?”

 

“Children’s books mostly. Adventures, fairy-tales. Alice in Wonderland kind of tales-” Rory pauses, just about to add 'make-believe' to his explanation before catching himself. Wasn't that exactly what Amy was doing now, thinking that she'd gone to Venice when she'd never even stepped on a plane in her life? In an effort to shift the subject, he asks River what her husband does for his living, conscious, as River is, of using the present tense instead of the past.

 

“Oh, John. In his younger years, he fancied himself an inventor. But he could never get investors. Bless. He used to say he was too ahead of his time, but he was also very much broke so he began to lecture at a university, like me.”

 

“At the same one?”

 

“No. Thank goodness. I don’t think I could’ve stood that for a week without wanting to kill him. He worked at a different university, one close enough in practical terms. But not too close. I know it may sound strange, but me and John are sort of the same in that we’re solidarity creatures by nature. We need our own space. We could never be in each other's hair twenty-four-seven. We'd go mad." The second she says that River regrets it. Of all the words to use to describe her and her husband, and she uses that one. Mad. But she recovers herself quickly, not wanting to pause the conversation for too long and draw attention to the what she's said. "Me and John, we've always sort of been long distance ever since we left school. Went to different universities, this time three and a half hours apart, then for a about a year I actually went alone to America to teach.”

 

“Before you married?”

 

“After. We'd been happily married quite some time. Still were. Just long-distance.”

 

“Maybe that’s the trick.”

 

“The trick?”

 

“To marriage."

 

“Maybe.” River neglects to tell Rory of how her and John had been far from happily married when she had left for America. Those memories are best left undisturbed.

 

-

 

When River returns from her visit to John, shortly after she steps through her front door, their cat brushes against her legs. She kneels down to run her fingers softly through Idris' grey fur.

 

"Just you and me again," River sighs, the silence of her house suddenly too still and loud at her ears without another person in it. "Come on," she says, "I think we both could do with something to eat."

 

After she feeds Idris, she busies herself searching for a can of soup - she is too exhausted to prepare or cook anything more complex - in the kitchen cupboard, she stumbles across a forgotten box of custard. For one ridiculous moment, she retrieves it from the cupboard and sets it on the kitchen side. For what purpose, she has no idea. A minute passes She checks the date on the cartoon. Still in, just about. She tosses it in the bin anyway. She has never liked the stuff, much to her husband's distress.

 

As she pours the soup into a saucepan, trying best not to focus too much to on the misshaped chunks of vegetable and red gunk plopping rather unappetizingly into the container, River stares out through the kitchen window, into the unruly, overgrown garden. She has promised herself she would sort it out in summer, but it was is near the end of April and the weather has brightened considerably, enough for a mow of the lawn at least. The house doesn't half need a good spring clean too, but River does not want to disturb the quiet that has descended upon it, to part the curtains closed in the spare rooms, to dust the corners, to even open the windows and let in some fresh air. She has a strange fear that if she does she will unearth something unbearable, a greater sense of absence than that which already consumes her.

 

 _She has to stop running from reality_ , she thinks. Her eyes focus directly on the blue box half-obscured by the long grass of the garden. It immediately reminds her of John, not that her thoughts have strayed from thinking of him much since she has arrived back home. He is always hovering in her mind, like a tormented ghost unable to receive closure, a ghost forced to wail eternally to the ears of mortals. The sight of the blue box sends a shiver down River's spine. _Her husband is not a ghost,_ River tells herself. He is not dead, even if the blue box, wood rotting, paint peeling, stands forlorn as if he is. Her husband is not dead, but he's like an idea not fully realised, a drawing not fully coloured in. He's a faded sketch in pencil, a painting that's blank in odd parts.

 

When River visited him earlier, it was clear that John had forgotten what day it was. She hadn't really expected him to remember, half of her hoped that he wouldn't. It might have been too painful. And it is still is, despite his unknowingness. She needs to forget about, to push the date from her mind but it refuses to disappear, even to shrink and quiver and fade until it is only a ghost of a memory.  Before turning on the hob, River glances again at the blue box.

 

"Happy Anniversary," she whispers to herself. And those words summon viscerally the memory of her and John's engagement to the forefront of her mind.  

 

-

 

_29 years ago_

River was halfway to smashing the phone to wall by the time John picked up on the 6th ring. "Why do you never pick up your bloody phone!"

 

"I told you. It's not mine, it's my friend's. He only lets me use it-"

 

"You know what I mean," she said, "why can't you just get your own phone?"

 

"No need," he replied, a smirk at his lips, "I'm working on something far better."

 

"Well, Sweetie, unless you plan on building a time machine so we can actually talk face to face anytime we like, so you can come over and visit me for days on end, but return to campus one second later, I'd really like it if you invested in a better form of communication other than the borrowed telephone of a temperamental lunatic and payphone boxes you always end up getting kicked out of before we've even said hello, then."

 

"Hang on. My friend isn't a lunatic."

 

"No. You are." There was an icy edge to her voice. She sounded like she was about to hang up. John sensed that her anger was not just because of today. Living hours away from each other, studying at different universities, was always going to be a test. But he hadn’t exactly tried to make it any easier for them.

 

“I’m sorry.” John ran his hand down his face, momentarily closing his eyes. “Not just for today.” He clarified. “But River, I am working on something. Sadly, it isn’t a time machine, but it'll mean I’ll be able to call you, any time I like, for as long as like. Anytime you like, my dear.”

 

River took a breathe, and when she spoke he heard that it had turned even and control. John knew her well enough to know that his apology hadn't had the desired effect. Her rage hadn’t disappeared; it had just sunk beneath the surface.

 

“Can you still not make it up north this weekend?”

 

He silence told her that the situation had not changed.

 

“Never mind then,” she said briskly, rounding off the conversation. “I’ll see you next weekend. If you like.”

 

The coolness with which she said those last three syllables, the unpassionate bland tone, one so uncharacteristic of his girlfriend, made John’s heart ache.

 

“River, wait. Don’t hang up. I will make it up to you. Everything. All those times I forgot, all the times I couldn’t make it, that one time where I couldn’t find the restaurant because I’d thrown the stupid, stupid map out the car window at 50 miles per hour and ended up driving in circles until I had to just go home.”

 

John tried some self-deprecating humour, but he didn’t manage to draw out a laugh from River – even a criticism of his driving skills, something River always relished to attack could not lighten the mood. However, there was a slight shift of emotion in her voice, something implacable, but definitely there when River spoke next.

 

“Good. Because I expect you to.”

 

“I will make everything up to you,” he reiterates, detailing once again his faults, his reasons for apology. The lack of phone calls. The train tickets he lost at the last minute. The extra shift of work he shouldn’t have agreed to take. “When we both graduate,” John promises, “I’m going to show you the stars. Take you on an adventure of many lifetimes, anywhere you like Miss Song. Prague. Paris. Cairo.”

 

“What? Like a gap year type thing?”

 

“More of a,” John searched for more exhilarating and exotic words than the dull, boring have-a-few-weeks-in-Thailand-or-something-before-settling-down-in-a-nine-to-five-job ones of ‘gap year’, “endless honeymoon.”

 

“Hang on! Are you asking me on a honeymoon? Are you asking to marry me?”

 

It was only then that John had realised the implication of what he’d said. Before he could stutter out an amendment to his phrasing River uttered something in a thick, fast voice that nearly stopped his heart.

 

“Yes.”

 

“No, hang on. Did you think I was asking you to marry me, or asking if you wanted to come on a honey- trip around the world with me?”

 

“Yes.” She murmured the word again in such a low and seductive voice, that her answer restarted his stuttering heartbeat, sent it racing.

 

“No, but was that yes, or yes?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“But is that a-”

  
“Aren’t they the same thing?”

 

“Well . . . I suppose . . . yes.” He had never felt more simultaneously excited and terrified in his life. His stomach didn’t just feel like it was full of butterflies, but as if he’d just ridden a rollercoaster and now all the tiny, fluttering creatures were whirling around inside him at a hundred miles per hour. John tugged nervously at his bowtie, before trying to regain composure. He straightened his back and lifted his head, as if he were about to address a room of politicians. Then he remembered River couldn’t see him. Despite his efforts to steady it, a tremor remained in his voice. This wasn’t a promise he was making lightly, ever since the first week of term, their first week spent apart since the start of their relationship, he had known he loved this women, completely. When she wasn’t there, lighting up his life with her suggestive euphemisms or daring propositions for some ‘fun’ that normally involved a minor infraction of common law and, perhaps, vodka, he’d missed her terribly. Such a crushing sense a loss had slowly lessened, but if he was alone, studying in his room say, a feeling would drift over him, one of unease, that something wasn’t quite complete. Him.

 

He thought that they could have made the long-distance work, and it did relatively well at first. It was his fault that it had all gone downhill. He was the one that kept missing their dates, until the moment came when  he couldn’t be quite sure if he was sub-consciously self-sabotaging. What if he had begun to evade seeing her, out of fear that perhaps she’d found somebody better, someone more-deserving of her, someone who wasn’t a fumbling mess of a man, who spoke too fast, never knew the right thing to say and had a tendency to miss their dates two times in a row. But, hearing River's her cold, emotionless voice a couple of minutes before, as she’d tried to mask her hurt, he’d decided that there was only one direction he wanted to run in, not away from her, but with her. Hand in hand.

 

“So what do you think, River? Want to get out of this place, start running and never stop?”

 

“I’d thought you’d never ask.” That was the moment when he knew he would love her, not just completely, but always.

 

-

 

Her husband’s mystery solution to all their communication problems had been a police box. God knows where he had acquired it, or where he kept it at university, but he always claimed to River that he had just left it, for the most time, on the side of a road or in an alleyway and that no one had really took any notice of it, apart from the odd graffiti now and then. Besides, no stranger could enter it. The box needed a key to open and he was the sole owner of such a thing.

 

-

 

"This is what you were on about?" she had asked, incredulous, when he had first shown off the blue telephone box to her and explained its purpose.

 

"Yep," he proudly replied, "my own personal payphone."

 

"Without the paying," she added drily.

 

-

 

Even now, it remains a mystery to River just how he got the phone working again, since, according to John's description of disrepair, the blue box was practically an antique item when he had found it. Found, of course, being the operative word. River had teased him relentlessly. He liked to think he had all these high and mighty morals, but, just like it was in her vocabulary, 'found' was John's language for stole. When she had questioned him over the legality of his sudden possession of a police telephone box, John had reasoned that nobody would miss the old thing.

 

River couldn't have really protested further. After John had adopted the blue box, he'd never stopped calling her, for details to of when they would meet up next mostly. Afterwards, he never missed one date. When they had both later gone travelling after graduating, they had had no other option but to put the blue box in storage, with a bunch of their other things. To say it needed a lick of new paint when they returned from their exploring was an understatement. But they had spruced it up. Together. She remembered that lazy, sunny Sunday afternoon that her and John had spent re-painting the blue box, painting each other and arguing over whether the bulb on top needed changing. Idris had ended up walking in a tray of paint and dotting the patio floor with blue footprints. Her and John had to drop their paint-rollers double-quick and make a mad dash to scoop up Idris before she could enter the house.

 

But, of course, those sort of days are long gone.

 

After she finishes her dinner, River looks out once again at the blue box as she washes up her bowl. The bulb on top undoubtedly needs changing. It is time to stop running, she resolves, before heading outdoors to the garden. When she pushes at the door of the blue box it groans as if annoyed at being disturbed from its slumber. Dusk has fallen over the garden. River wonders whether this was foolish, for what can she hope to achieve? She should at least wait to morning. It isn't like she, or the blue box, are going anywhere. Hesitating from steping inside it, she opens her palm and inspects the key she had just used to open the door with.. John had had it cut for her, not long after they were married, as a silly, sentimental wedding present. The phone-box had always served as a link between them, no matter how far apart they had been in terms of miles at their different universities. As John had given her the key, shining in its newness, he had told her that he never intended to sever that link.

 

River looks down at the scratched and dull key in her palm, before clutching her hand tight around it as if to hide its degeneration from her eyes, as if to pretend it is still shiny and new, but in doing so the ridges of the key dig into her palm, sharp and cold. _This is a foolish idea,_ she decides and goes to retreat inside her house without even entering the blue box. As she lifts the key to lock it back up, the phone rings.

 

She freezes.

 

No one, no one but John, should be able to reach that number. No one should be able to catch her at such a perfect moment, when she is mere seconds away from being able to pick the phone up. The phone shouldn't even be in working condition, according to what she can remember. But, still, it rings on. After taking a steadying breathes, she opens the door and grabs the phone. The voice is a familiar one, but it's not her husband's. Something heavy pulls on her heart as they informed her of their reason for calling.

 

"How did you get this number?"

 

"It was on your husband's file. We tried-"

 

"What's happened?" She fires the question with the grim resolution of a detective inspector asking a forensic expert for the particulars of a new case, footsteps away from a fresh crime scene. The staff at the facility never tell her much over the phone, even if they thankfully did call, at River's insistence, when 'incidents' involving her husband happen. Almost mechanically, after ending the call, River secures the blue box and goes back inside to fetch her car keys. The journey to the facility is a short, quick one. Rush hour has passed and she knows the route like the back of her hand. As she drives on, snippets of conversations, as familiar as memorable lines from old movies, sneak into her head.

 

_You could let me drive!_

_Or we could go where we're supposed to for once!_

 

 _You nostalgic idiot_ , River reprimands herself. Her and John had fought endlessly over who was the better drive of the pair. They had revelled in the competition of it all, with River insisting they he drove like a mad man and they wouldn't make it to their destination unscathed if she let him take the wheel. At this present moment in time, River wishes for nothing else than for John to be sitting with her in the car, her in the passenger seat, him in the driver's. Whether it is the desire for company, or the thrill of his reckless driving, she craves, she can't be sure.

 

When she arrives at the facility the second time that day night has fallen and the place is in turmoil. Crowds of patients and staff alike are congregated outside the building, waiting to be let back in by officials. Bomb scare, someone mutters to River, a false one. No need to worry. Everyone's safe. But River can not be assured of that fact until she finds her husband in the crowd with his friend Amy. Lately the pair have become inseparable. When River approaches them, they eerily confide in her in union, an identical note of fear in their voices.

 

"We've found the Pandorica.”

 

John explains to how civilisation is under attack by every creature imaginable, how the universe is prophesised to explode. River is struck with a distressing thought, one that vehemently grows with believability, the more she tries to argue against it in her head. All these people have been evacuated from the facility for one reason: John's imagination.

 

There is no threat. That is all in his head. All part of his illness. There is no threat. River closes her eyes briefly. For John’s sake she needs to be calm. As one of the psychologists had told her, he depended on her for a source of reason. When she opens her eyes, she sees that her husband has climbed atop a car. Within one hand, he grips a megaphone stolen presumably from one of the staff trying to instil order over the confused evacuated patients. His fierce yells flood the night air.

 

 _There is a threat,_ River thinks. _How could she forget? Her husband is a threat to himself._

 

"Who takes the Pandorica takes the universe!"

 

His mighty words beam up to the sky. They dare imaginary monsters to invade the world, as if this moment of reality is merely an act and, to close it, the tormented, gallant hero of the play is scheduled to take centre stage and soliloquise his troubles. It is all surreal. All the other patients are staring at John, mostly with shock plastered over their features. At the least, a dazed look. But they are all expressions of an audience’s detachment.

 

It is only Amy, apart from the concerned staff, that bears fear on her face, fear mixed with resolve, with anger, determination. Her face is an almost perfect parallel to John. She is the only one that seems to understand John and the impending battle he is trying to rally against. When John finishes his enraged speech, his eyes shoot right down at River. There is a dark intensity fixed in them, an expectation, a knowingness, of terrible things that must be committed not far from now, as if River knows not just the exact reason for the chaos of the present, but all the chaos of the past and future combined. But River feels anything but omniscient right now. Inexplicitly, she feels young, lost, naïve. She feels like Pandora. The one thing she has any certainty on is this: further troubles are within a breath’s distance, waiting, growing, ready to erupt. Her husband had spoken once of a crack in a wall, the wall of Amy’s bedroom. He’d told her how cracks kept reappearing in different places across all of time and space, following him and Amy.

 

River feels that her world has a similar frangibility. The relationship she’d once had with John is like an ancient, fraying tapestry on the verge of disintegrating, its colourful memorial of tales faded and barely discernible.

 

River has no idea what one more crack in the universe, one more tear in their relationship might mean for the future.


	4. Together

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> '“It’s a book, a diary if you want, for you . . . for you to write about your adventures in.”
> 
> “My adventures?”
> 
> “Your antique collecting. Your heroic drunken acts. Whatever.”'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings: Slight allusions to the loss of a child, but the real heavy stuff comes in the next three chapters, even if the next chapter is my favourite.

 

“Me and Amy,” Rory tells River of his wedding anniversary as they sit on their usual bench, “we had our first date only a couple of streets away from here, at the picture-house.”

 

"What film did you go and see?"

 

“You know I can’t remember. It’s funny, though, to think how we’re here, all these years later, only a few streets away, in the same town. It’s like nothing ever happened. We never went anywhere. Of course, not everything’s stayed the same. The picture-house is gone. They converted it to a library. It’s quite nice, actually. Have you been?”

 

“No. But I’ve driven past it a few times. Always fancied a peek in. Can’t resist a library, me. All those books, all those shadows of history, right under your fingertips.”

 

“You met your husband in a library, didn’t you?” Rory remembers River saying something of that form a few weeks ago.

 

“Sort of,” she hesitates, “well, it’s complicated. I remember noticing him properly for the first time in our school library. Me and John used to go to the same high school when we younger. We were always running into each other. We were in the same year. He’s younger than me, couple of years in fact, but he’d been moved up to my year. Whizz kid,” Melody explains, “anyway, somehow, it always seemed like we’d run into each other . . . be partnered as lab partners, get in detention the same time, study in the library at the same time, bump into each other in the corridors. . .”

 

“I’m guessing you didn’t do the whole crash into each other and drop all your papers sort of thing, like in the pictures?” “And that’s when he plucked up the courage to ask me on a date?”

 

She gives a soft chuckle. “Not quite.”

 

Her and John’s relationship had been anything but orthodox, even from the very beginning.

 

“We met properly at a house party.”

 

River remembers that that night was anything but cliché.

 

-

 

She was wasted. She wasn’t sure quite what state the boy moping alone on the steps of what she supposed was their mutual friend's front porch was, but he wasn’t sober.

 

Earlier that night, River had arrived on a stolen moped. She knew that driving it back to its owner wasn’t option. Going back to the children’s home where she lived wasn’t an option either. The staff their would hit the roof. She didn’t know exactly why she had sunk down next to John on those steps to think over her life choices, but she had known that she couldn’t keep going on like this, getting into fights, getting drunk, racking up a record of petty theft and no so petty theft. Of course, not officially. River was too clever to get caught.

 

So she sat down and lit a cigarette. Behind her, amid the thumping music within the house, came a smash. John laughed. It was a quiet and dry laugh, but the smug knowingness of it infuriated for some reason.

 

“What?”

 

“Oh, it’s nothing.” Another laugh from John.

 

“No really, what?”

 

“It’s just I knew it wouldn’t survive the night. The chandelier. The mass of . . .” He spoke so fast that River couldn't catch much of his babble other than ‘equilibrium’ and ‘mass’, but it was his smirk, when he scoffed about the fact that the teenagers had the arrogance to think they could defy Newton’s law of gravity by trying to hold on to the low-hanging chandelier, that got under River's skin.

 

River took a drag of her cigarette. “It was a cheap and nasty imitation anyway.”

 

“Imitation?”

 

“Yes. Imitation. Of an art-deco alabaster chandelier.”

 

“Antique collector, are you?”

 

“Sort of.” This time it was River’s turn to laugh. Her voice dropped conspiratorially low. “Sort of not.”

 

“How not?” John turned to her in interest, but she ignored his question.

 

“God, this family has mighty delusions of grandeur, she mused, “almost everything’s fake or second-best to the real thing. Everything but--”

 

He cut her off. “Everything but their silver and cut glass Edwardian inkwell. I saw you eyeing in up in the cabinet.”

 

“I know you saw me, but that wasn’t what I stole.”

 

“I know you know I was watching you.”

 

“Well you didn’t see what I actually stole, so it doesn’t matter.” River laid a hand on the bag at her side, and made to get up, tired with her new companion’s haughtiness.

 

“I replaced what you stole. The thing you took, the frankly hideous whiskey glass you settled for, I put it back.”

 

At his words River scrambled to open her bag. The smug bastard, she cursed inwardly. Quickly, but carefully she opened the cushioned case she had brought with her to the party and unwrapped the package inside it. She scowled at John.

 

“Oh, I hate you.”

 

“No you don’t,’ he retorted, watching her run her fingers over the beautiful glass pattern of the inkwell.

 

“Now we’re both thieves.” His voice jolted River back to reality. She remembered where she was, directly outside the house she had just stolen from. Swiftly, she replaced the inkwell back into its protective packaging and into her bag.

 

“We’re antique collectors.” She corrected John with a devilish smirk. “Thing is, I don’t want the inkwell anymore,” she told him, sidling up to him on the porch steps. She didn’t need to steal. She did it for the thrill, the satisfaction. The idea of taking something back from this godforsaken world, after it took her parents, her childhood.

 

But suddenly all the enjoyment was gone. Her head was foggy with vodka. She wanted one thing only.

 

“What do you want?” John tilted his head to motion towards the house, as if offering to steal her another thing from the occupant’s cabinets. River laughed. He was casually suggesting to thieve, but his eyes were full of innocence. _He has no idea what she wants_ , River thought. She replied to his question by leaning in to him. The penny dropped in his head just before her lips touched his. Just enough time for River to store away the memory of cigarette smoke and midnight air and anticipation in her befuddled brain.

 

Things didn’t exactly go so romantically well after that. How had River been supposed to know that he had a peanut allergy and that she shouldn’t have eaten them earlier? That she would nearly kill him the first time they kissed?

 

Of all the ways first kisses could go, River had never imagined frantically quizzing the other party while they were in anaphylactic shock for the whereabouts of their epi-pen. Luckily it was in his car, parked only a street away. She imagined she looked like a madwoman, the corkscrew curls of her hair flying everywhere, drunkenly running on high heels. When she reached his car, gasping for breath and yanking at the car door she remembered she hadn’t thought to have asked for John’s keys. Bugger. She had to break into his car before scrambling for the epi-pen. After finally finding it, her shaking hands had let it slip to the floor. Falling to her knees to grapple for the damn thing in the darkness, River hit her head off the open car door, hard. The pain for it, however, came later. Fear was her adrenalin. She ran back to the house for her life, John’s life.

 

When she returned to the front porch, through ragged breathes she shouted for instructions on how to use the epi-pen.

 

Through some miracle she saved him. John survived.

 

Shortly afterwards, waves of relief flooding over her as she called for help, she had felt a dizziness overcome her and collapsed down the front porch stairs. She woke up the next day in a hospital bed, not just with a sore head but a broken arm. Friends visited. She asked for John. She wanted to know if he was okay. It turned out he wanted to know the same of her. The following day, when she woke up, he was there with a lopsided, sheepish smile on his face and a blue book wrapped with a red ribbon behind his back.

 

“What’s this for?” Her eyebrows furrowed as he revealed his gift and placed it gently on her bedside table.

 

“For you.”

 

“Forgive me for being forward, but I guessed that Sweetie.”

 

“To say thank you,” he elaborated, too shy and nervous in the sobering light of day to form anything but monosyllabic sentences for the moment. River smiled as he fidgeted with his bowtie.

 

“For nearly killing you?”

 

“For saving me,” he took a minuscule step closer to her before gesturing to the blue book. “It’s a book, a diary if you want, for you . . . for you to write about your adventures in.”

 

“My adventures?”

 

“Your antique collecting. Your heroic drunken acts. Whatever.”

 

“I’m afraid I’d wouldn’t even fill more than one page with the second.”

 

“Then write about . . .write about when I take you somewhere to say thank you then.”

 

There was a pause. River pursed her lips as if in realisation. “Smooth.”

 

“Smooth what?”

 

“Asking me out.”

 

“I wasn’t. I’m not. Not in that way. I-” John’s face crimsoned. River took pity on him.

 

“Hush. It’s alright. I know you just want to say thank you. It’s a lovely gift. And as for those extra pages of writing, well, you’ll have to wait until I’m out of these.” She motions to the bandages on her arm. “No more adventures for me for a bit.”

 

From then on, he visited her almost every day in the hospital. After she got out, she visited him nearly every day. That was how it all began.

 

-

 

_Presently_

“Calm down, please, nothing bad is going to happen,” River’s words come out fast, breathless, broken. But there is no stopping him. John is enraged. He is oblivious to the tears threatening to spill in his wife’s eyes because of his words. “No one’s going to-”

 

“It’s not your fault,” he steps forward and clasps her trembling hands, “I know, it’s them who are going to make you do it, Melody.” He raises her hands to his lips and kisses them. “They took you when you were just a baby.” River flinches. A nauseating feeling grows in her stomach. She tries to push it down.

 

“No one’s going to try to kill you my love.” River blinks back the tears she will not let herself shed, not until she is in the privacy of her home. “Especially not me.”

 

“It’s alright,” he reassures her in a low, soothing tone as if she is the one in denial of reality, but his voice does anything but comfort her. River bites back a sudden, inappropriate urge to laugh. This cannot be happening. She should have expected it. Rory is always telling her how Amy’s world is her past. How she is struck there, believing herself to be a young woman. River just never thought John, even in his illness, would use her childhood against her like this.

 

“I know it’s got to happen,” he carries on, “and I know that you’ve got to do it. You’re the woman that kills me.”

 

Her husband is never going to be John Smith again. River finally accepts the truth. He will forever pretend to save the universe, forever martyr himself for the good of earth. He wants, he needs to be a hero, even if he thinks it will kill him.

 

-

 

Two months after the anniversary of his and Amy’s wedding, Rory pencils in a Doctor’s appointment on the calendar pinned up on his kitchen wall. Their wedding day always feels simultaneously like yesterday and a thousand years ago. In Rory’s memory their wedding vows are like a badly faded photograph, one in which you can only discern an arm or leg here or there. He can only recall a few words, the promise he’ll keep to his dying breathe.

 

_Together or not at all._

 

Later that day he discovers that Amy had painted a new picture, strangely absent of any little figures or cracks in the wall. She has drawn an astronaut helmet. The visor is open and clearly inside floats a tiny baby. Tears streaming down her face, but her breath perfectly even, Amy turns to Rory.

 

“I’m pregnant. At least I think. We think.” The fear in her voice at this possibility chills Rory’s heart.

 

“Who thinks?”

 

“Me and The Doctor.”

 

Rory can't help raising his voice in response, struck by a terrible grief that knows only at this present time to bubble over into anger. It is that other patient’s fault, ever since he had arrived Amy had grown worse. That John Smith is the one feeding ideas into her head, upsetting her unnecessarily, dredging up the past.

 

“There is no Doctor, Amy. There is no baby, either.”

 

Amy sinks to the floor, pulling her knees up to her chest protectively as sobs rack her body. Rory doesn’t know what else to say.


	5. Or Not At All

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> '“You’re the woman who marries me,” he says. She nods in silent agreement, tears glistening in her eyes. Her hand clutches tighter on to the end on a bow-tie he has remembered to offer her. The thing that hurts the most is that he acts like they have never done this before, like this is the first time for him. John does that a lot. Whereas whenever he holds her hand or kisses her on the cheek, River wonders whether it will be her last.'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay so this chapter deals with River's and Amy's backstories so warnings are as follows: mentions of mental illness, of cancer, of the loss of a child, child abuse (but there is never anything in depth or explicit). 
> 
> N.B. A huge thank you to those that have left kudos and especially those that have commented. Writing is a very solidarity process and it's always lovely to know that people read your work, and must importantly enjoy it.

 

The inkwell John stole for her at that party all those years ago is cool and heavy in River's hand. Before now she has never actually used it, but today she fills it with black ink and writes in _April 22nd_. Her and John’s wedding day has come around again. Holding the bow-tie they first wed with in her left hand, River scrawls down in her diary what she will never say to him. Wedding vows.

 

It was a tradition of theirs to write each other new wedding vows every anniversary. Normally, at 5:02, the time they had spoken their original vows, they would tell each other what they had composed as they wrapped a bow-tie around their hands. One year they had a competition to see how much double entendre they could sneak into the vows. They had never officially declared the winner, but John’s beetroot red complexion had made it quite clear.

 

The whole idea was peculiar. River was under no illusions that it wasn’t, but she cherished the tradition. Only she had broken it last year, and now has come to accept that it will never fully be completed again. She can write vows, but she will never speak them to John. She can visit him on their anniversary, but no doubt he’ll have forgotten it like he did last year. She tells herself that his forgetfulness is something silly and petty to feel upset over, when not that long ago John was in a coma in hospital. He is lucky to be here today. That is what she should focus on, but she can’t shake off the longing for the life they had together before the accident, before her world was turned on its axis.

 

River remembers telling Rory of her and John's wedding in an almost nonchalant tone, whilst inside she had felt as if her heart was painfully rusting like a broken piece of clockwork that lay forgotten in some dusty, dark attic.

 

“Shortly after I graduated we got married," River had told Rory, "John took me to Egypt. Ever since I was a little girl I’d wanted to see the pyramids . . . Cleopatra’s kingdom. And that's where he popped the question."

 

River remembered how she had not taken John seriously at first and was about to inject how he had already sort of proposed to her, but then it quickly dawned  that he meant the question literally. Right this second literally. Ceremoniously, with a flourish of his hand and a lightbulb-grin on his face, John had undone his bowtie, wound it around their hands. His eyes questioned hers. They twinkled. It wasn't often River Song was speechless. He watched her bite her lip, her eyes flitting down to roam over his lips. They quirked at the edges as John began to ask her again, but before he could, in answer, River crushed her mouth upon his and kissed him like the world was on the brink of collapse.

 

After that, River and John never did see the point in buying wedding rings, or even legally formalising their vows when they returned home. They had never needed anything but the vows that they had written into each other’s skin on their wedding night, and the bow-tie, the artefact of their love. Every anniversary had been the same since.  Wherever they were on their travels they would always have a bow-tie and each other to complete their secret ceremonial. They went on to marry next to the rushing flow of a waterfall, miles high in the sky in a hot air balloon, on the snowy peak of a mountain, on a far-flung hidden beach with the sand between their toes and the sea lapping in close, on a lazily drifting rowing boat, in their own back garden under the simple beauty of a sunset. _However, like this year_ , River thinks, _they will not travel anywhere._ She is just here. Nowhere special, lying in bed, writing, crying. Nowhere special at all. River bites back an acerbic laugh. On the contrary, their bedroom has heard the most heartfelt vows of them all.

 

After she finishes writing, she flicks through her diary and finds an creased plane ticket to America she had tucked into the pages. It is not River's, but John’s. When she had spent the year there, he had flown out to her for their wedding anniversary. He had stayed with her a week. It had been a respite she had desperately needed. A whirlwind. Because her husband had brought with him one bit of paper that was to ensure that they wouldn’t sit still for one moment the _entire_ seven days. A bucket list.

 

Number One: Eat in an American diner with red leather seats and a painting of Elvis on its wall. Bonus: if it had straws with lots of fizz.

 

A wild adventure was the tonic that they had needed. It reminded them of the years they spent travelling after university, gallivanting across the globe with not much more than a backpack and their wits. And of course, each other. River’s year in America could have fractured her and John's strained relationship further, but instead the week helped to renew their bond. Before River had left for America the couple had been going through a rough patch, the worst of their relationship so far. John was getting into his mid-thirties, River her late-thirties and she had stopped using the pill with one purpose in mind. John had always wanted children. He loved children and although he had never once pressurized her, River had always known that fact and for a while, although scared of the prospect of motherhood, believed she had wanted children too. So they’d tried. Without luck. River remembered the confusing but familiar mix of disappointment and relief every month. After a while they’d gone to a clinic, but nothing worked. Then, one day, she refused to try anymore.

 

Secretly, she had thought their lack of success was her fault, even if the doctors said that there nothing was wrong with her. River thought there was. Her parents had abandoned her and she hadn't had an orthodox childhood. She had run away from her first and last foster home at the tender age of eight, a foster home in America later shut down by the authorities for child abuse. Fear was the greatest resource a child in River's circumstances could utilise and it sent her onto the streets, it sent her running, even though she shivered with cold and felt sick from whatever her foster carers had injected her with. She was found of course, eventually, transferred to England and put in an care home there, but River swore never to let herself be moved around again, never to be placed inside another foster home again. Never again, River vowed, would she rely on anyone, but herself for safety. Survival was second nature to her.

 

Supporting a child, however, and having a tiny, helpless creature dependant on her for its safety was an idea that had been terrifyingly foreign to River. She knew John would be a brilliant dad, but how could she be trusted not to mess what child they had up? She probably would by genes alone. She was never sure what her foster carers had done to her all those years ago, what chemicals they had pumped in her. Nothing apart from sickness - and that had passed once she was rehabilitated - had knowingly physically resulted, but they didn’t mean to say something wasn't lying dormant within her, waiting to infect her baby. Then there was who she was, what she'd been through. Could she actually bring a child up and give it all it needed and deserved, having never received that when she was a little girl. How would know what to do?

 

Then there were the battery of tests, the check-ups, the stay in hospital when she gave birth. Coupled with the possibility of complications, all those procedures would be almost unbearable. River hated hospitals, hated the idea of people taking care of her, prescribing her drugs and hooking her up to things. When she had broken her arm falling drunkenly down the porch steps after she had first met John and nearly killed him, she had left the hospital earlier than the Doctor's orders, as soon as she recovered from her groggy, dazed state and her arm had been thoroughly bandaged and immobilised. She would have left as soon as possible after she had woken up, but when she did John was there, with the diary, with his nervous, adorable smile. When he had visited her the next day, he had persuaded her to stay in hospital just a bit longer. But she had taken the 'bit'  very literally. Two days, to be precise. They were made a somewhat bearable because John was there, visiting her, making her laugh, telling her weird stories she said he was making up but he swore had actually happened and were real historical events.

 

Years later, River had also bit back her fear and forced herself to look into treatment after months of her and John trying for a baby. Mostly it was out of guilt. Every time the pregnancy test had been negative she had saw John's face fall in disappointment. The man had probably secretly gone to a DIY store in his lunch break to look at shades of paint for a potential nursery. Perhaps he had even been in a mother and baby store, the type where they sold every type of bottle, rattle, pushchair, cot and whatever else imaginable. River remembered how her and John had once gone shopping for a gift for Craig, one of John's friends who had recently become a father for the first time. River had to stop him from buying out the whole store. When River grew up, she knew John would dote on the child as if it were his nephew. Seeing John hold Craig's son for the first time, the way he had stared at the baby like it was a miracle, had broken River's heart - just that morning she'd shown John another negative pregnancy test. As John, in a silly high-pitched voice, began to sprout gibberish at the child, claiming he could speak baby, telling the little boy that his bowtie was, in fact, cool, River could only imagine him with his own child. Their child. But whenever she did, memories of her childhood flooded her brain. Terrible ones.

 

When River had been found by the authorities and rehomed as a young girl, no one would tell her much about what had happened. The people running the foster home weren't there anymore was all they had thought fit to tell her. No more. River knew, however, that they the police probably hadn't found and arrested her foster carers. The authorities were probably still in search of them, and sure enough, soon after River was found the trail went cold. Growing up, River had scant knowledge of her childhood, only hazy memories, horrendous nightmares that jolted her awake, heart-pounding, in a cold sweat, and a fear of needles that far surpassed your average one. River had only found out one piece of information during the time when the authorities had temporarily looked after her. She had overhead a discussion between the psychologist that had interviewed her and a police officer. She only made out two words.

 

 _Lebensborn Two._ River had intended to be part of a new, stronger generation of pure Americans, reared like soldiers, under the care of a Soviet-run organisation. The Russians planned to weaponize American children and use them against their own country. Children make the perfect spies, the perfect followers, so easy to indoctrinate, their minds so malleable and their bodies so healthy and strong. Europe, the USSR and America were in the grip of a Cold War. Before the Berlin Wall, the West still had a sneaky foothold in Eastern Berlin, a perfect base for espionage, a perfect escape route for Eastern Berliners to flee through. It brought the East to the brink of economic collapse. The Soviets wanted to level the playing field. Almost overnight came the Berlin Wall, solidifying the 'Iron Curtain' seemingly once and for all, and in the deepest, darkest heart of the criminal under layer of Russian society, a Madame Kovarian devised a war strategy to fashion children into soldiers.

 

Of course it was only when River was older that she had understood it all. Afterwards she had gone to vomit in the bathroom, but nothing came out. She had closed her eyes, took a deep, cleansing breathe. Imprinted on her eyelids were the photographs from the history book she had taken out of her high school library, photos of SS troops, of black and red banners, of children, dead children, scared children, knife-thin children, saluting children, smiling children, sobbing children, children with yellow stars, children in brown shirts.

 

 _Give me a time machine_ , River had thought, _and I’d kill the bastard. The leader of the Third Reich._

 

Of course she knew, history could not be rewritten, it could only be revaluated. It's horrors needed to be uncovered, otherwise someone, anyone might write the same lines again. Even if she couldn't stop those who might, River could at least recognise the story. You couldn't fight something you didn't understand. You couldn't confront a reality you knew nothing about. Perhaps, that was why she had always had a keen interest in history, and why she had later chosen archaeology. When River had been at university, she'd taken History as a subsidiary module. ' _Let’s Kill Hitler’_ had been the title of an assignment she’d later wrote on the legacy of fascism and whether a then still divided Germany had fully broken from its past in the second half of the 20th century.  She’d got full marks. Afterwards she’d burnt the papers. 

 

Over the passing years, she'd tried to push to the back of her mind the memories of her childhood. But when she had received a letter from America, saying that new information had come to light about what had happened to children like her, about the runners of the foster home, enough information for a court case, she’d felt compelled to go. Maybe answers were what she needed, closure, after all her childhood was no more than a horrendous blur of glinting needles. She remembered the way her room at the foster home would lit up in a storm at a crack of lighting, the way it would illuminate the shadows of falling raindrops on the bare wooden floorboards for a second before darkness would once again fall over the room. Her memories were mostly darkness, and she had needed to light them up. Even if, when she was a child, the lightening had only made her room like even more frightening, River needed to know exactly what had gone on all those years ago.

 

So she went. Alone.

 

 John insisted that he needed to go with her, he wanted to be there to support her. She'd refused.They’d been arguments, ugly, drunken arguments at 2’O’clock in the morning full of words they wished they’d never said, and some words they hadn’t realised had needed to be said. Then after one row, River had told John all she knew about her past. She admitted to him why she was scared of having children. She was damaged. When he had apologised for being such an insensitive, selfish idiot and why she felt she couldn’t tell him all this before - something to do with him of course - River had told him, not really, it was her. She had said it was because she was always used of hiding the damage.

 

"You never have to hide the damage to me," he had told her, cupping her face tenderly in his hands, "because I am always here, and I always listen, River."

 

They stopped trying for children and River booked one ticket to America. Even if John desperately wanted to be there for her and not a million miles away, he knew he had to accept that River needed to go alone. He feared it was either that or let go of their relationship forever. After River’s confession, after John had accepted that he needed to let her go, their relationship had begun to slowly heal. Things were still sore between them, but they were better. The day before River was due to fly out to the states, they had even acted like they were teenagers again. John had, out-the-blue, whisked her out to an ice-cream parlour in typical John-style. On the way back, in an off-the-beaten-track area of town, they’d nearly had made-out in the car until she had insisted that while she had always been happy to indulge in a bit of exhibitionism, they were simply too old for it so she had driven them home and dragged John – practically by his bowtie – indoors.

 

River was checking her packing list later that evening and standing over her open, nearly-full suitcase on their bed when John had appeared in the doorway, grinning like the Cheshire cat. “I have a thing for you.”

 

“A thing?” she had chided him jokingly when he whipped out a Stetson from behind his back. “It is a common thing . . . to have a foolish husband.”

 

John looked abashed. He lowered feebly the hand that had so excitedly produced the Stetson.

 

“It’s Shakespeare, Sweetie.”

 

“So you don’t think I’m foolish?”

 

“No.” She chuckled. “A bit mad yes, but all the best people are.”

 

“Oh, so you will-”

 

“And I love you all the more for it, but there is no way _on earth_ that I am taking _that_ with me.”

 

“But it’s the US of _A._ You have to wear it.” River raised her eyebrows at her husband, hoping he'd quickly recall the time he'd worn a fez. It had ended up in a pond and it had been entirely River's doing.

 

“Alright,” he said and a bit too gladly he shrugged his shoulders before placing the Stetson atop his head.

 

“I’ll wear it to work.”

 

“You will _not_.” River chucked a rolled-up T-shirt, one she had decided against packing, at John’s legs.

 

“Oww,” he rubbed his knee, feigning injury. “I was only kidding."

 

“And I’m the Queen of Egypt, Sweetie.”

 

“Okay. So I may have brought some really cool, cow-boy boots to go with the Stetson."

 

"Do not."

 

"Do not what?"

 

"Yowzah."

 

"But _River_ think how cool I'll look."

 

River rolled her eyes. Sometimes her husband was the actual embodiment of a twelve-year-old. Sometimes on a sugar rush.

 

"The students will think they’re stepped onto a film set for a Western. Or that you’re bonkers. Or both.”

 

“You’re the one who’s packed an entire clothes shop into your suitcase for a three-month trip, dear.” This time River aimed a balled up pair of socks at him. They hit him square in the chest.

 

“Well, sweetie,” she had smirked, something dark flashing in her eyes as she pointed to the dress she wore, “it’s a pity if you think that, because I was just going to pack this.”

 

“Thinking about it, you know, I think perhaps you haven’t packed enough.”

 

“I thought you would come to that conclusion.”

 

By the time River had finished zipping her suitcase and despotising it in a corner of the room, John had jumped on the bed. When River looked up from the suitcase, she put her hands on her hips. John was lying on the bed, legs loosely crossed with his arms folded behind his head.Humming.

 

“I’m not kissing you until you take that _thing_ off," she instructed him.

 

 John’s hand flew protectively to his hat.

 

“I’m deadly serious, Sweetie.”

 

“Fine,” John relented. When his wife motioned for the hat, he regretfully passed her it and, to his horror, watched her carelessly throw the item across the room before returning to him with a triumphant smile plastered on her face.

 

“Now are you going to kiss me, or –”

 

John pulled her onto the bed and deftly covered her body with his. He whispered mischievously in her ear. “I’m going to make you pay for that Song.”

 

-

 

River’s stay in America had lasted longer than three months – nearly a year. The case against her abusers had frustratingly collapsed, but she hadn’t been to just give up on her search for answers and go home. After a few weeks spent fruitlessly hunting for information at libraries and pestering the cops, River made up her mind. She would visit her foster home. She wasn’t surprised when she found it derelict and decaying. _It was like an empty tomb,_ she had pondered. _If there was ever one that shouldn’t be opened, that was it._

 

But she never _could_ resist a tomb.

 

When she knocked on the door no one answered. She broke in easily enough. The walls were stripped of their paper, the floorboards bare. In a cloud of dust, River had spotted a spinning top, pocketed it. River was a thief by profession. She liked to know things, to inspect things, to uncover things, if you did then they couldn’t hurt you. You were in control. As an archaeologist she’d learnt that they were no such things as ghosts, just bones. Puzzles to be reassembled. In countless cultures people hid their secrets, cloaked them with the threat of a terrible curse to befall upon anyone who dared disturbed the dead. But River knew death had no secrets. And if there were still missing pieces of a skeleton, it was her job to find them. Her childhood might forever remain a half-mystery. She doubted her abusers would ever be brought to trial again, even if she had spent months trying for a retrial. As River slid her hand into her coat pocket and felt the spinning top, she realised that she was only doing what she had done her entire life – stealing things. All her life she had been trying to, in some way, take back what her abusers had stolen from her, things like the simple, childish enjoyment of wondering when a spinning top would topple, instead of being spun by another’s hands like one. She might not be able to steal back fully her childhood – even if she had been drawn to John particularly for the fact he had a joyful, endearing streak of impulsive childishness in him – but she could steal the spinning top.

 

It made perfect sense, and it didn't. Regardless River didn’t remove the spinning top from her pocket and drop it back to the floor.

 

After she had left the building, River had called John to tell him she was coming home. He picked up first time, something he hardly ever did, always busy pottering away with something in the garden or too absorbed in a book to notice the first ring of the telephone. He sounded like he was close to tears.

 

She’d told him she was going to stop running. He’d told her that she could run as long as she liked, as long as it was with him.

 

-

 

When River visits John in the evening, having replaced her diary in her bedside draw and put all her memories of America, good and bad, in with it, John surprises her. His proposal, however, instead of making her heart blossom in joy, sends an invisible bullet through her chest. His words don’t make much sense. One minute he flits between resignation and anger, the next loathing and desperation, but River catches the gist. He thinks they must marry to save the universe.

 

If they touch, they will be radioactive.

 

 _Thank Goodness, the carers have not checked up on John yet,_ River thinks. They would understandably be alarmed, since his warnings bear such uncomfortable similarity to those he made a few months ago, when he had foretold that an explosion would engulf all of reality and send cracks throughout the whole of time and space. The management had had to evacuate the whole building from fear of a bomb threat. But River knows there is nothing to fear in that sense. To everyone else her husband is simply a very ill man whose words are grandiose, but harmless. To her, though, his words are anything but harmless. Every time he calls himself The Doctor and her Melody, a name stolen from a fairy tale, he inflicts a pain on her, concentrated, sharp, impossible to ignore but minuscule to anyone else’s eyes, a pain like that of a constant paper cut on the most delicately sensitive skin of your palm.

 

She hides the pain, hides the damage by becoming complicit in her husband's own delusions, responding to him like an actress with a script.

 

“You’re the woman who marries me,” he says. She nods in silent agreement, tears glistening in her eyes. Her hand clutches tighter on to the end on a bow-tie he has remembered to offer her. The thing that hurts the most is that he acts like they have never done this before, like this is the first time for him. John does that a lot. Whereas whenever he holds her hand or kisses her on the cheek, River wonders whether it will be her last. He might forget her, write her out of the story his brain has concocted. He might one day stare as blankly at her as he did upon waking up from the accident in the hospital after River had asked if he knew who she was.

 

For John the wedding ceremony is momentous. He thinks that they are saving the universe. For her it is theatre. She feels like an imposter in her own life, acting out someone else’s most private, cherished tradition. As she winds the bowtie around her hand, she feels as if she is desecrating a holy relic. Amy and Rory are in the room with them, at her husband’s insistence. In the corner of River’s eye, they appear like the dark swathes of an audience when the stage lights blind you. River doesn’t know if she can forgive herself for inhabiting this role so unthinkingly. Never before has she encouraged John like this. She has become Melody Pond, beautifully wild, beautifully reckless, beautifully mad, beautifully his.

 

“We are ground zero of an explosion that will engulf all reality. Billions on billions will suffer and die.”

 

River stares straight into John’s eyes, even if looking into them feels as if she is looking into the sun for they burn so vehemently with anguish.

 

“I’ll suffer if I have to kill you.” What she says is almost wholly truthful. She will only suffer more with each passing day John believes himself to be The Doctor.

 

“More than every living thing in the universe?”

 

“Yes.”

 

He whispers into her ear the most tremendous secret. His real name. John. River shivers. Does he know what he is saying? Does some part of him deep down remember his past life, his real self? Is he beginning to remember? What if this is all just some kind of nightmare? What if she is the one that is mad? What if he actually is The Doctor? River shakes those thoughts out of her head, inwardly chiding herself for thinking such things. Her husband is sick. He needs her comfort. He needs to know he is not alone. That is the only reason why she is pretending this whole charade is real. She's not putting any misconceptions in his head, she's just emotionally holding the hand of her husband. Aren't you meant to do that for the ones you love?

 

John tells her that the world is dying, and that he can’t possibly bear it one moment longer. River realises that this is reality and dream in one. She has blurred the lines by playing along. But John is not The Doctor and she is not Melody Pond. She has not been fashioned into a perfect soldier like he thinks. She has not become the soldier her foster carers wanted her to be. Even so it has cut her to the bone that John's mind has manipulated the reality of her childhood into his own fiction. But, River reminds herself, she is no longer that scared, little girl in America. She is not someone’s weapon. She is River Song, even if her husband’s long, desperate kiss insists otherwise. Even if she kisses him back. Even if by doing so she has just, even if for only for a moment, become Melody Pond.

 

-

 

Up until now, Rory has tried to ignore the frequent aches and pains he suffers. They are getting worse, but he puts them down as merely the tell-tale signs of old-age. Visiting Amy every day is challenging as well, if not exhausting. Things with Amy . . . they are getting difficult. A few months ago, around the time she had first told him he was pregnant, he had unintentionally drifted into a light nap. Amy had been absorbed in her second painting without any cracks or figures in it, one of a young girl in an astronaut suit. When Rory had woken up his arms were covered in tally marks. Amy’s too. Amy insisted that, while she had drawn tally marks on her own skin, she had not drawn them on his. He had done that himself. She warned him that they were everywhere.

 

“What were?” He had asked.

 

"I can’t remember. I think they make you forget.”

 

A few days afterwards Amy had told him that she had been mistaken. She wasn’t pregnant after all. She said it quite distractedly, as if she was merely remarking to a fellow stranger waiting at a bus stop that it had stopped raining outside. Amy returned to her third painting. It was of an empty astronaut suit – there was no little girl this time - with a bullet hole through the visor. She was so captivated in painting that she didn’t notice Rory slip out her room, tears forming in his eyes. He remembered when Amy had told him that she was pregnant over 40 years ago. He had been overjoyed, bursting with excitement at the prospect of a son or daughter. A mini him or Amy. A mini them.

 

The baby had been still-born.

 

When they had buried her, Rory and Amy had buried parts of themselves too. They had argued increasingly in the dreadful months that came after, until one day she kicked him out. Gave him up. That’s what she had told him she had done, when they had got back together after realising that they needed each other to get through the bad day, even if they feared the bad days would never end. Over the years, the wound their loss had inflicted closed but the scar remained. And Rory had never wished to scrape too painfully over it, never wished to recall those dark days wilfully. Only when he had walked in that day to see his wife painting a little baby girl, peacefully asleep in an astronaut helmet, the pain of the memory had flashed in his mind. The painting was not a memorial or tribute. Rory quickly realised that Amy couldn’t remember what had happened. When she confided in him soon after that she thought she might be pregnant, Rory understood that in her mind she had not lost the baby. In her mind she lived the carefree years of her early twenties, the carefree years before the baby. In her mind she was running away from a reality she couldn’t confront.

 

She's running still, even if she's not going anywhere.

 

She will forever remain in her early twenties, forever waiting for a pregnancy that will never happen. But Rory can no longer wait with her. After several visits to his GP and a referral to a specialist, Rory now knows that there will few good days left to share with her. Few any days. Deep down he had known something was wrong, something serious, but Rory hadn’t expected to have so much snatched from him at a doctor’s diagnosis. Cancer. Terminal.

 

Rory does what is necessary. He settles his will. He sorts out his belongings and hires someone to clean his house once and for all, and then one day, when his health is rapidly failing and he’s not sure he’ll last to the end of the next month, he books two plane tickets to New York. One for him.

 

One for Amy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: With writing River's backstory like that I intend no anti-Russian/ pro-American or even anti-German sentiment. I just thought with the whole 1960s America context in the show it might form a good backstory for a human AU.


	6. Running

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I’ve decided I’m taking you out,” he announces to her, “Somewhere brilliant I promise. Someplace we’ll never forget. It’s what you deserve after all that you’ve done for me.” John motions to the suit he is wearing and his new hair-cut. “I’m going to take you to a place so alive with music you’ll feel as if it were singing itself.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok so warnings folks: all previous ones apply, mentions of suicide, depression, attempted domestic abuse.

River sees it in the way the staff at the facility stare at her. The way they try not to. There is more than just curiously in their stares. River can hardly blame them. Rory and Amy Williams are missing. Over the past weeks the staff had watched River become a close friend of the elderly man, John a close friend of Amy’s. The staff do not ask it out-loud, but the question lurks in their eyes, the suspicion under their smiles. How exactly did a severely ill, seventy-nine-year-old man manage to kidnap his wife, their patient, without them knowing before it was too late?

 

 _Shouldn’t you be asking your colleagues that instead of me?_ River had replied to one member of staff who’d asked, even though River was well aware that her bank statement – listing two aeroplane tickets to New York - proclaimed the opposite. She is exactly the person they should be questioning. If only someone was to delve a bit deeper, then trouble would follow. A lot.

  
River had used to love that word: trouble. Elusive. Tempting. The trip of the T off your tongue. The pop of the B on your lips. Trouble. She used to go out and find it for fun. She used to twirl it like a plaything around her little finger. Not anymore.

  
-

  
“What trouble have you brought to my doorstep this time, Song. You bad, bad girl,” was how John had greeted her  when she had appeared at his house, a month before they were due to start university.

  
River sighed, dramatically. “A warm welcome to you as well, Sweetie. Who says I’ve done anything?”

  
“The suitcase you’ve been lugging up towards my door that looks as if it’s got all your worldly possessions in – or at the very least half your collection of high-heels.”

  
“I need . . . a place to crash – for a bit.”

  
“Is the trouble coming with you as well?”

  
“Oh quit fretting Grandpa,” River instructed John, “I haven’t brought any trouble.”

  
Luckily River was too busy barrelling past John and through the front door of his house for her to catch him rolling his eyes at her. As she strode through the hallway she called back to him. “But if you do see any coppers coming this way will you give me a shout?”

 

For a moment John stood flustered in the doorway, staring out at his front lawn, then reality set in. River Song was in his house. She was going to see everything he had tried to hide from her.

 

"River! Come back!"

 

He turned and ran after her.

 

It was too late. She was already in his living room, resting her suitcase up against a wall like she’d lived there her entire life.

 

“So this is why you never invite me ‘round.” River began to scoop up all manner of items from his tartan-blanket decked sofa: dog-eared magazines that looked like they were dated from the 1950s, dozens of crumbled sheets of paper, empty orange juice cartoons, and even a not-too-fresh banana peel.

 

John stood open-mouthed, struggling to process the situation. His girlfriend had just breezed into his house like she owned it, like he was a tenant she was about to kick out after returning from a vacation. She looked like she belonged there, and that bit he didn’t really mind. He kinda liked it. Just not the whole police potentially knocking on his door thing. Oh, and the fact that this living room, despite its state of disarray, was, to his shame, the only safely accessible room in the house.

 

John Smith, River later learned, was a bit of a hoarder. A collector of oddities. The spare room was so stuffed full of cardboard boxes that you couldn’t see a square metre of bare carpet. And the bedroom had to be carefully navigated or else you might knock one of the many stacks of books in there and get swallowed up by an avalanche of literature. Then there were the clothes. His mismatched piles of colourful socks, his fez collection, all his bowties, the bright yellow one, the rainbow polka-dot one, the stripy purple and orange one, the cool one with stars that glowed in the dark . . .

 

River was currently showing no hesitation of cleaning up his house. If she saw upstairs she might clear it out.

 

The Doctor tugged nervously at his bowtie.

 

“Are you . . . erm . . . stopping?”

 

“Well that looks to be generally the idea doesn’t it, Sweetie? Now,” she deposited the banana peel in the living-room’s now-nearly-overflowing bin before dusting her hands together, “how about a cuppa?”

 

John squawked in terror as she made a beeline for his kitchen, a kitchen John knew to be entangled with strings of wool – about six sheep’s coats of it – and also had a pot of an acid green concoction bubbling away on a countertop on its centre. It was all part of an experiment. The place was more of a laboratory than a kitchen. Oh God, John thought. What if she saw the jar in the freezer? The jar with a human hand floating in it?

 

River Song in his house was a bad idea. A very bad idea.

 

“Wait, wait, wait!” John rushed after her at such a speed that he managed to wrap his hand around the handle of the kitchen door before River could touch it. She turned to him, eyebrows furrowed, trying to guess what on earth he was playing at.

 

“Really, Sweetie, what –”

 

“You can’t go in there,” he told her. “You can’t – this – this isn’t a hotel service!”

 

“What’s got your knickers in a twist?”

 

“I’m not going to be there every-time you feel like running away.”

 

“And you are so wrong. Now come on, let me past, I’m dying for a cuppa.”

 

John stepped closer towards her, gripped the handle of the door tighter. River gasped.

 

“Are you trying to pin me against the wall?”

 

John recoiled back a step. He stuttered apologetically, “I’m sorry. I . . . I didn’t mean to try and intimidate you.”

 

“Intimidate wasn’t the word that came to mind, Sweetie,” River purred coquettishly.

 

John blushed, then, in what he hoped to be a pose of seduction leaned causally against the wall to his right side. Slipped. Only just saved himself from landing in a heap on the floor. River bit back a laugh. The more time she spent with John the more time she realised he wasn’t going to outgrow his awkward baby giraffe phase any time soon. And it made her adore him even more.

 

“Come on then, tell me,” he said, trying to distract her from the kitchen business, “what are you running from this time?”

 

“I . . . got into a bit of a scuffle. Long story short. He survived. The idiot the scuffle was with, but now – now Mr Niles wants very serious words with me. He says that one day he fears he won’t just be waiting outside the headmaster’s office for me, he’ll be waiting outside a prison cell. Like he cares.”

 

Mr Niles was one of the staff who worked at the care home where River lived. _Where she was imprisoned in_ , she would moan to John. In response he would simply tap her on the nose, and tell her _not forever._

 

“So . . . can I crash at your place?”

 

He nodded, but added, “You can’t run forever.”

 

“I can try.”

 

He kissed her briefly, smiling. “And try you will.”

 

-

 

River has always wondered why he had added in the try. Why not just keep the confidence of the three words on their own? Now, as she sat opposite her husband in his room at the facility, holding his hand in silent comfort, she realised promises wee fool’s gold. They made you hungry with hope, but ultimately left you with the bitter taste of disappointment on your tongue. River knew John seldom made promises he couldn’t keep.

 

River also knew he had no secrets, not true ones. His tales of far-off planets where three suns burnt in the sky and stone angels crept to life when you blinked sounded like they had grown from a powerful mythology, but it was just merely fiction. He had no idea he was making it up. It was River who was the outright liar.

 

The day after Rory and Amy had disappeared, John had told her how all the stone angels in the garden had vanished too. _Taken Amy and Rory with them. Back in time._

 

River hasn’t since corrected him. She hasn’t said otherwise, but sometimes omitting the truth, keeping silent, is a lie in itself. John never needs to go about River’s part in Amy and Rory’s disappearance. How Rory had confided in River about his plans to finally grant Amy her dream of visiting the city that never sleeps, before his time on this earth ended. That’s how Rory had phrased it. As if his impending death was simply another journey. Of course, as an archaeologist, River knows that it is a belief that has weathered the ages. Something, anything after death. How different was a plane journey to New York compared to a boat on the river Styx?

 

Amy will feel truly like she is in her twenties again, flitting around the bustling streets and spinning round excitedly in the art museum, running up to the Van Gogh painting. The sunflowers in the painting are not fresh ones. They have lost their vitality and are so frangible that they are on the brink of falling apart, but the painting is all the more stunning for it. Amy will pick the sunflowers apart delicately in her artist’s eyes as if they are newly-budded.

 

This River tells herself to try and ease her conscience a little. It is what gives her the strength to fortify the many facades she has become accustomed to putting on in John’s presence. They are the flood-gates that hold down the surging ocean of her own grief. She can’t let her own anguish show, when she must comfort John in his. The Doctor, having just lost his wonderful Amelia Pond, is sobbing as he reads a piece of paper in his hands.

 

It is titled _Afterword by Amelia Pond._ The piece of paper was left, freshly typed, in the typewriter on his desk – a typewriter River thought was broken. River watches her husband read it over and over again. One or two of his tears blot the ink on the paper. River is not concerned. She stole the afterword, as carefully as a newly-discovered artefact, before John had a chance to see it. She had photocopied it before replacing it, before pointing it out to her husband.

 

It was one piece of comfort to him, even if Amy’s words of being sent back in time and her and Rory living a long and happy life together, was fiction. A bedtime story to sooth a frightened, restless child.

 

Amelia Pond was a fairy-tale to John and all stories can have an afterword.

 

-

  
_a year later_

River’s smile dares to meet her eyes for once. The immediate weeks after Amy and Rory had gone had been tremendously difficult for her and John.There had been incidents, angry outbursts on John’s behalf. Awful moments. Like the time John had begged River to help him go back in time and save Amy and Rory, as if she easily had the means, but selfishly refused to rescue the couple. That day she shouldn’t have even gone to visit John. The carers had advised her not to visit for a few days. River had long neglected her work and had student’s papers piling up to mark. She hadn’t been able to take much time off. Amy and Rory had not been family, and River had already taken a substantial amount of bereavement leave in the weeks following John’s accident.

 

River never knew why, all those months ago, her husband had attempted suicide. And she probably never will.

 

That knowledge plagues her every single day. And on that awful day, when John’s temper had boiled over, River had found herself staring into his eyes and wondering again just why he had done what he’d done. Stepped in front of a speeding car, with no intent to survive. Before the accident, they’d been no signals that anything was wrong – River constantly tried to run through her memories to see if she’d missed them. There must have been signs.

 

That destructive energy was still inside her husband. River saw it in his eyes, as he sprung towards her, arm raised. “Why won’t you save them Melody?”

 

Before his hand could make contact, River had stumbled back, fallen. Somehow broken her wrist. She had cried out instinctively in pain. This time she couldn’t hide the damage. John was horrified, crouching down to where she was and rapidly apologising over and over again.

 

The incident had been a while ago, but it haunts her mind. The wrist has healed and she has tried to push the awful memory back into her mind, but, even though her husband’s temperament has vastly improved, she sometimes flinches when he goes to take her hand in good nature.

 

That is the first thing he does when enters his room this morning, before tenderly pushing back strands of her hair behind her ear.

 

“I’ve decided I’m taking you out,” he announces to her, “Somewhere brilliant I promise. Someplace we’ll never forget. It’s what you deserve after all that you’ve done for me.” John motions to the suit he is wearing and his new hair-cut. “I’m going to take you to a place so alive with music you’ll feel as if it were singing itself.”

 

At that moment the penny drops for River and her smile dares to meet her eyes. John is talking about the Singing Towers. She frequently used to tell him she’d like to go, when he had asked her, as was his habit, of where she would go if she had all of time and space at her fingertips. Trouble is the monolith’s gone now. It might have never existed. Some people say it was in Greece, others that it is just a myth.

 

That the Singing Towers stood for hundreds of years, through storms and floods and wars and time. That no one really understood where the music was thought to come from. It was probably something to do with their precise position, the distance between both towers. No one’s sure. But there is a tale that has been passed on down the ages, that when the wind stood fair and the night was perfect, when you least expected it but when you needed it most there was a song.

 

River wonders if John wants to take her to the restaurant down the road called The Singing Towers. The one named after the myth. Probably. She hears that the music there is sublime. She’d loved to go.

 

But she can’t. They can’t.

 

“You know,” she tells John, firmly but softly, “that we can’t just leave this place.”

 

“Of course we can.” He taps her on the nose. His eyes sparkle mischievously. “Time is not the boss of us.”

 

River shakes her head.

 

“Come on,” he implores. “It’s a date. I’ll get the motor. I’ll have us back before tea-time.”

 

River thinks of Rory, then. How even though he was dying, he had chosen to grasp just that tiny bit of joy he could find and squeeze it out of life. No matter what. _It was time_ , River thought, _for her to be that brave_. No one expects happy ever after. No one expects forever. Rory didn’t. But there is time, a little time. If you go and find it.

 

River remembers her date with John when he had taken her up a cliff side to watch the stars. How he had told her that you had to find those hidden moments of light in life. How even though the stars might have died, the universe hadn’t caught up yet and there still glowed, still lived when you looked up at them.

 

There is still joy to be found yet. Still light. Even if stars burn the brightest at their end.

 

“You are not driving us anywhere. We’ll walk.”

 

“So is that a yes?”

-

  
_24 minutes later_

 

Sneaking out of the facility is easy enough. It is the task of finding the restaurant that proves difficult. John maintains that it is down this street. River says it is a dead end. John is certain it is around here. River tells him they are lost.

 

“No one’s ever lost,” John says, “They’ve just found something they weren’t expecting to at the wrong time.”

 

River realises that they stand opposite the new library that has been built, the one she had talked about with Rory. Across the road the tall building looms.

 

River is trying to make out whether it is open when it happens. When John shouts delighted, “This is where we first met!”

 

He is wrong of course, it hadn’t been this library, but it had been a library. It is near enough. But not quite.

 

It is a tiny misunderstanding, but huge at the same time.

 

It sends John rushing across the road, towards the library doors in a frenzy of wild excitement. He doesn’t see the car speeding towards him.

 

But River does.

 

John only sees the black of the tarmac as River pushes him forward, out of the way. Nothing else. But he hears it. The thud. The screech of tyres afterwards.

 

He hears River’s body hit the road after the car tosses it up into the air.

 

Then nothing. Silence.


	7. Always

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> John just continues to sob freely over his wife’s crumpled body, murmuring her real name over and over again as if it is a prayer in a foreign language. John watches as blood meanders through her halo of golden curls. She is a diamond he thought was indestructible. But even diamonds can destruct when faced with extreme temperature and conditions.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ok all previous warnings apply. This chapter deals briefly with the issue of dementia.

“River? River!”

 

Frantically, John Smith cries out his wife’s real name for the first since his accident, but she doesn’t hear him howl out the four syllables. They clang in the exhaust-fume heavy air with all the solemnness of church bells. River doesn’t feel John's tears splashing on her cheeks as he crouches over her, or feel the warmth of his trembling hand as he searches for her pulse.

 

John doesn’t hear the crunch of tyres of tarmac as drivers slam hard on their brakes, their cars shuddering to a horrified stop. He doesn’t hear the shocked gasps of the gathering crowd of onlookers or even the click of a mobile phone, someone hoping to catch and immortalise this scene of chaos and misery.

 

John just continues to sob freely over his wife’s crumpled body, murmuring her real name over and over again as if it is a prayer in a foreign language. John watches as blood meanders through her halo of golden curls. She is a diamond he thought was indestructible. But even diamonds can destruct when faced with extreme temperature and conditions.

 

A brown-haired woman coming out of the library catches sight of John and hurries over to him, mobile phone clutched tight in her hand as she agitatedly relays information to the emergency services. As the woman approaches closer to John she sees the tears flowing down his cheeks – and she knows.

 

“Regenerate! Regenerate!” John screams. The brown-haired woman thinks his desperate orders are the gibberish of a man consumed by a sudden, excruciating grief. Denial. The brown-haired woman knows that the body the crying stranger cradles has no life left in it. As the woman tentatively places a hand on John's tweed-covered shoulder. John turns his head to her. “She gave all her regenerations to me,” he explains to the stranger, “she gave me all her lives. Tell her I won’t let her die. Tell her she has to regenerate.” 

 

 “What’s your name?” The woman asks.

 

“The Doctor,” John’s voice is barely a whisper. “I think.”

 

“Well then, Doctor,” the woman says, “I’ve phoned for an ambulance. It’s on its way. I’m going to try and clear the crowds back there. But then I’m coming back and I’m going to wait with you, if you like."

 

As the woman makes to go, John grabs her hand. “Don’t leave me,” he pleads, “please.”

 

“I’ll be right back.”

 

“What’s your name?”

 

“Clara. Clara Oswald.” She squeezes John’s hand momentarily before going to clear away the gathering crowds.

 

“My impossible girl,” John mutters, before taking one of River’s lifeless hands gently in both of his and bringing it to his lips to kiss. “Clara’s going to get help,” he says, reassuring both himself and his wife, “then she’ll be back. You can meet her when you wake up."

 

When John looks round to see where Clara is, he spots River’s diary. It was flung from her grip at the car’s impact. _She brings the book along to every date_ , John recalls. The diary lies a few feet away, open, pages fluttering in the breeze.

 

“Give me one second, dear,” he tells River, softly releasing her hand and placing it on her chest, “and I’ll be back.” When he retrieves the diary, he unintentionally holds it open on the last page. It is the only empty page of her diary. Pressing the scarred, faded diary to his chest, John darts back over to River’s limp form.

 

“This isn’t the end. Time can be rewritten.” John goes to push River's hair back from her face. His fingers come back with blood on them. Sirens blare in the distance. Clara jogs back to his side. “She’s coming back,” John tells Clara, “I’ll see her again.”

 

Unable to respond, a painful lump forming in her throat, Clara’s gaze sweeps over the ground. She rapidly blinks back tears.

 

“Is this yours?” She reaches down to pick up a card on the floor. When she hands it to John, she sees that it is a patient identification card for a mental health facility for a John Smith. The picture matches the face of the man she has just met.

 

-

 

“How are you doing that? I’m not really here,” River asks him, astounded.

 

 _It’s simple_ , says John's smile as he catches his wife’s hand before she strikes him. In dreams loved ones can exist forever, even if their image is just a flickering few seconds of a tape repeated over and over again in the mind. Because that's all you can really remember.

 

“You are always here to me. And I always listen, and I can always see you.”

 

John Smith thrashes in his sleep, kicking off the bedcovers and exposing the thin, frail pyjama-clad body of an elderly man. As he kisses his wife in his dream, the clock ticks past midnight, announcing the 20th anniversary of her death.

 

In his dream he first mistakes her dress for a wedding gown, but upon closer examination he sees that it is too creased and faded to be such, the crumpled skirts drape loosely on the ground like the last yellowed page of River’s diary.

 

“Well, then. See you around Professor River Song." He uses her real name. Like most things these days, he can only remember it in his dreams. By tomorrow he will have forgotten it.

 

“Till the next time, Doctor.”

 

John finds that River's promise is an empty one. His wife never appears again in his dreams. She vanishes in a crackle of electricity, forever, just after hinting at a reunion that John thinks will only happen in death.

 

Then he remembers what needs to be done. Clara, his impossible girl, has been shattered across time and space in a million fragments. He must run after her, even if slipping back into his time-stream is stupidly dangerous. Impossibly so.

 

The following morning Clara, a local school-teacher who took to visiting John more and more in the facility after the car crash, who first visited out of kind concern, but stayed for the fascinating stories of wonder and adventure The Doctor told her, rushes to his hospital bedside.

 

A stroke, the doctor informs her.

 

Vascular dementia, the same doctor will explain to Clara in the following weeks. Memory loss.

 

“Do you remember them? Amy and Rory Williams? Your wife?” Clara will tentatively ask John in the future, using his preferred name in an effort to coax out any spark of a memory. “Doctor?”

 

He will touch his bowtie without knowing why, and reply:

 

“Who?”

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from Fleetwood Mac's 'Dreams'.


End file.
